Effective Interviewing: A Handbook of Skills, Techniques and Applications

Effective Interviewing: A Handbook of Skills and Techniques

Robert Edenborough

KOGAN PAGE

Effective Interviewing: A handbook of skills and techniques

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Effective Interviewing: A handbook of skills and techniques 2nd edition

Robert Edenborough

First published in 1996 First paperback edition published in 1999 Second edition 2002 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licences issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned addresses: Kogan Page 120 Pentonville Road London N1 9JN UK

Kogan Page US 22 Broad Street Milford CT 06460 USA

© Robert Edenborough, 1996, 1999, 2002 The right of Robert Edenborough to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0 7494 3755 3 Typeset by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

To James and Tom, who have always asked lots of questions

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Contents About the author

ix

List of figures

xi

Preface Preface to the second edition Acknowledgements

xiii xv xvii

1

The place of interviews The interviewing scene 1; Plan of the book 3; Definitions and origins 4; Interviewing processes 7; Conscious versus unconscious 10; Other exchanges 12; Summary 14

1

2

‘Conventional’ selection interviewing Interviewing is popular 15; How to do conventional interviewing 20; Intention and practice 26; Interviewing horror stories 28; Summary 31

15

3

Structured interviewing in selection Scope of structured interviews 33; Deriving interview models 36; Criterion, competency-based and critical incident interviews 44; Structured psychometric interviews (SPI) 48; Summary 56

33

4

The extended interview 57 Degrees of structure 57; The board or panel interview 58; Assessment centres 59; Feedback and follow-up interviewing 64; Work sampling interviews and auditions 66; Conclusion 67; Summary 67

5

The use of interviews in managing and enhancing performance Introduction 69; Appraisals 70; Performance improvement and disciplinary interviews 76; Staff development 78; Summary 85

69

viii Contents 6

Interviews in counselling and guidance Introduction 87; Redundancy counselling 91; Vocational guidance 96; Other crisis counselling 98; Marriage guidance and bereavement 99; Summary 102

87

7

Shifting the focus Introduction 103; Job evaluation interviewing 103; Selection design again 106; The interviewee as expert 106; Gathering evidence in legal proceedings 107; Survey interviewing 108; Survey interview methods 109; Survey applications 113; Summary 120

103

8

A variety of interview applications Introduction 123; Journalistic interviews 123; The ‘post-event’ interview 128; Examinations and interviews 129; Interviews in the helping professions 130; Psychological and other social science interviews 132; Management reviews 135; Summary 136

123

9

The future of interviews Interview research 137; Changing patterns of employment 141; Changing practices 144; Surfing the communication waves 145

137

Appendix I: Sample SPI report

149

Appendix II: Some UK counselling organisations

153

References

155

Index

165

About the author Dr Robert Edenborough is a principal consultant in the Ex ecutive Search and Selection Di vision of KPMG in the UK. He heads the Management Re view and Assessment Practice there. He pre viously led the Consulting Practice at ASE – a leading test publisher and prior to that w as principal consultant with MSL, the international recruitment and consultancy specialists. A chartered occupational psychologist, Robert Edenborough has considerable e xperience of designing and applying interviews in organisations as diverse as the Ministry of Defence, the NHS and a range of financial service institutions. He has held senior posts with several major international companies: Head of Psychometric Testing and Assessment in ICL (1978–84), Managing Director of Selection Research Ltd (1984–89) and Head of the HR consulting division of Oasis Management Consultanc y (1989–91). A regular contributor of papers at v arious international conferences, Dr Edenborough is also the author of Using Psyc hometrics (Kogan Page).

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List of figures Figure 1.1

Interviewing with a pre-determined structure, financial advice.

8

Figure 1.2

Options in a counselling interview.

9

Figure 1.3

Some conscious and unconscious indications in interviews.

13

Figure 2.1

The mutual halo effect.

25

Figure 2.2

Pros and cons of different interview configurations.

29

Figure 4.1

Stepwise process in assessment.

60

Figure 4.2

Competency coverage by exercise type.

64

Figure 5.1

Sources of information in two different interview settings.

71

Figure 5.2

Development centre, summary results.

79

Figure 6.1

Other’s discovery and self-discovery.

90

Figure 6.2

Stepwise programme of redundancy support.

93

Figure 7.1

Information flows and decision making in a range of interview applications.

104

Figure 7.2

Market research interviewing without and with computer assistance.

112

Figure 7.3

Steps in conducting a survey in an organisation.

115

Figure 7.4

Two common survey scaling formats.

116

Figure 7.5

Survey findings and band of error.

117

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Preface I started specif ically to think about a book on intervie wing while preparing my pre vious book; Using Psyc hometrics (Kogan P age). I had been struck then by the f act that although there were ob vious opportunities for linking dif ferent systems for studying other people, these were rarely grasped. The v arious gaps, o verlaps, redundancies and complementarities among, say , a three test psychometric battery and a standardised interview process, tended not to be articulated and seemed little understood. This got me thinking about intervie wing as such more widely . Why are con ventional selection intervie ws so much maligned and so widely relied upon? W as it because all of us, not just psychologists, are e xperts on people? Do journalists’ interviews, the questioning of witnesses and the use of a tasting panel to try out a ne w k etchup recipe ha ve an ything in common? Are all of these interactions simply more or less specialised forms of that important part of e veryday communication: asking and answering questions? In fact my concentration on intervie wing pre-dated the thoughtfulness arising from writing about psychometric tests. I had been w orking for some time with criterion-based intervie ws for managers. Originally this w ork had been focused on assessment centres where this form of intervie w w as being used as much as an ything to help cover competencies not seen as readily assessed by e xercises. (Staff development w as one of these.) I then became e xposed to the v ery different techniques in volved in conducting counselling intervie ws. This included an intense period when I had central responsibility for performance improvement and redundancy counselling for managers. This w as followed by my f irst e xposure to what I ha ve labelled the Structured Psychometric Intervie w (SPI) in which questions and interpretative guidelines are carefully researched and rigidly applied. All of these cases had in common the idea of focusing upon the individual, helping to mak e decisions about him or helping him to make decisions about himself. Ho wever the generality of the interview situation struck me as I considered the range of circumstances in which I had used intervie ws to gather information from indi viduals, but to inform decisions that did not af fect them directly . Thus as an

xiv Preface applied experimental psychologist I had conducted debrief ing interviews as part of laboratory experiments and equipment trials. Latterly as a management consultant I had also used intervie ws to establish competencies, plan climate surveys and to tease out scenarios for use in development centres. I became a ware, too, that for man y of those whose jobs I was studying – from salesreps to lawyers – interviewing was an important part of their working or professional life. The aim of this book, then, is to pro vide a vie w of intervie wing practices and phenomena to aid the manager or personnel specialist as practitioner. In nearly all w ork settings better understanding of others, whether candidates, peers, subordinates or clients, mak es for better results. By casting the net of practice quite wide I have endeavoured to pro vide reference points for those whose practical concerns do, in f act, include intervie wing, b ut who may not ha ve had the opportunity to gi ve much thought to intervie wing methods as such. By indicating some of the links, continuities and perv asive issues in interviewing I hope I shall also pro vide some stimulus to the serious or amateur student of psychology or other fields of social science. To seek to co ver all intervie w usage in a single v olume would be unrealistic if not impossible. What I ha ve essayed in this book is to cover a broad sweep, focusing in most detail on those types of interview where I feel some of the insights of personal e xperience may be of use to the reader , b ut hopefully underlining throughout the v ery generality of the interview situation.

Preface to the second edition As I endea voured to demonstrate in the f irst edition of this book, the field of interviewing is undoubtedly ancient in its origins. Indeed, it is inextricably bound up with a whole range of human discourse and so virtually coeval with language itself. Against this backdrop, then, one might re gard it as presumptuous to assume that half a decade or so should have given rise to major changes in theory or practice in this field. Yet some changes there undoubtedly are. F or example, although it is ar guable as to ho w f ar and in what w ay the Internet has had an impact on interviewing per se, it and other aspects of remote communication will undoubtedly continue to make some impact on interviewing as in so man y other f ields. (Indeed it could be ar gued that it is these very developments in communication that are no w at last bringing about some aspects of the dystopian f iction of the f irst half of the last century from Zamyatin’s We to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.) Inevitably, there are also changes in associated f ields such as psychometrics and assessment centres that will ha ve an impact on interviewing practice and vie ws. So too will dif ferent attitudes to aspects of w ork and the role of selection for a job as opposed to giving guidance on aspects of careers in general, which is increasingly becoming part of the intervie wer’s focus. Other de velopments include interest in studying whole groups of indi viduals in situations such as mer gers and acquisitions, assessing the capability of the whole team and grasping the implications in ‘human capital’ terms of what can be re vealed. The intervie w is the foremost instrument here because of its f amiliarity and lack of intrusi veness, with the scope to go where other techniques may fear to tread. Again, even if there were no need for this type of updating there is certainly a need for continuing to sound messages of what intervie wing and perhaps, in particular, structured interviewing is all about. As manifest of this no less a sophisticated or gan than the Financial Times trumpeted ideas about structured interviewing in the current year (2001) as if it had made ne w discoveries, whereas in f act the approaches being described were being practised in some assessment and selection circles from the 1940s if not the 1930s onw ards. Thus there seems to be a continuing need to declare what interviewing is and has been about!

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Acknowledgements I should like to thank MSL for support and encouragement in preparing this book. Although I had been w orking with interviews for many years prior to joining them I ha ve found a more v aried range of interview applications gathered under one roof than e ver before. Working with colleagues in acti vities as di verse as e xecutive search, client satisfaction studies, counselling, telephone screening and the design of role-play e xercises has provided inestimable e xperience and scope for much practically focused debate. I should, ho wever, point out that the views expressed are my o wn, and are not to be tak en as necessarily representing those of the MSL Group or any of its subsidiaries. Among colleagues who deserv e particular mention, Jessica Beresford and Ian Foster saw through the production of the diagrams. Doug Prior provided detailed suggestions on the early chapters of the book. Antoinette Bak er made v aluable comments on the chapters on conventional and structured intervie wing. Gareth Bennett-Coles and Sue Jackson both pro vided helpful insights for the chapter on counselling. Peter Sandham and V alerie W ilson both supplied ideas. Andrew Harle y supplied references and made a number of useful suggestions on sources. The second edition of this book has been drafted since I joined the Ex ecutive Search and Selection Practice at KPMG. I should point out that the vie ws e xpressed are, again, my own and should not be tak en as representing those of KPMG. I am grateful for encouragement and support there from Colin GrantWilson, Katherine Huggard and Sharon Bick. Among others who v olunteered information or responded readily to my requests, I should lik e to mention Professor Alan Clark e, formerly of Hull Uni versity, Professor Cli ve Fletcher and Helena Thomas of Goldsmiths’ Colle ge, Dr Jonathan Hill of the Gallup Organisation, Angela Mulvie of W ellpark Consultanc y, Dr Da vid Dance of the Ro yal Marsden, Nicholas Taylor of Epsom Colle ge and writer Paul Mungo. Barry Cushw ay engaged in discussion on man y of the ideas represented. Barbara Phillips has w orked cheerfully, efficiently and promptly to type an erratic and frequently changing script. My sons James and T om and my niece Penn y made a number of suggestions on content. Last in order , b ut f irst in support is my

xviii Acknowledgements wife Marion. She has not only tolerated my hours of study and withdrawal from domestic concerns, b ut has helped throughout by reviewing and commenting on the te xt and, most importantly , by giving this enterprise her wholehearted endorsement.

to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature Hamlet

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1 The place of interviews THE INTERVIEWING SCENE A range of settings A recruitment consultant and candidate sit on comfortable sof as in an office. The consultant refers to a series of notes he has made from the candidate’s CV and says, ‘I see that you ha ve had e xperience with X, Y, Z technology, but I’m not clear what your responsibility w as for the project that your company was running. Can you tell me a little more?’ A line manager enters a syndicate room in a management training centre, briefly greets an intervie wee and enters into a series of questions from a prepared list, co vering the competencies of staf f development, strate gic planning and orientation to change. Occasionally she asks follow-up questions and probes. She makes notes continuously throughout the discussion. A personnel of ficer picks up the telephone and e xplains to the person at the other end that he is w orking with a prepared intervie w and w ould lik e to tape-record his responses. After agreement the interview proceeds. Occasionally the intervie wee asks for clarif ication, to be told gently, ‘however you would like to respond is okay’. An outplacement counsellor sits and listens while the man before him enters into a diatribe about the or ganisation that has just decided to make him redundant. After a while the counsellor says, ‘Your feelings are quite natural and understandable. What we should be w orking with among other things is helping you to set them in conte xt and so use that energy that you are showing now in relation to your future job search.’ He does not intend to tak e the discussion v ery much further on that occasion. A financial consultant explains to a couple in their living room that

2 Effective interviewing if she is to advise them professionally she must e xplore a number of aspects of their background situation and establish their needs. The y nod in agreement b ut at the end of the session she will ask them to sign a form indicating that they have actually understood her role and agree to her advising them. A group of four people assemble behind a green-baize co vered table. Two of them, including the chair of the meeting, are elected council representati ves with the others being the director in volved and the personnel manager . In an adjacent room a candidate w aits knowing that she is the f irst of three people to be seen that morning. She is invited in, motioned to a chair and the questions begin. A patient enters a GP’s surgery. He looks up; ‘Good morning Mrs X, how are you today?’ He has already noted the reddening mark under the patient’s left eye and wonders if this will even be mentioned by her and if so if it will be dismissed as, ‘I b umped into a lamppost’, and how far he will get in explaining that the ‘something’ she needs for her nerves is to be as far away as possible from her violent husband. These, then, form some of the range of intervie ws e xperienced variously and commonly in the course of w orking and everyday existence. Questions, answers and listening are common. The y vary in the degree of pre-planning and structure. The y are also dif ferentiated one from another in the general form that the y will take, the expectations of the parties involved and the skill level of both sides. They are all recognisable as types of interview and as such are themselves only distinguishable by a series of slo w degrees from other forms of interaction involving speech. The ‘Can I help you?’, ‘What size do you take?’ and ‘Can you w ait a week for the alteration?’ are questions familiar to an yone shopping for a garment. ‘Why are your grades so poor?’, ‘Would you do better with another French teacher?’, are examples relating to a parent intervie wing a child on her school report. These shade into the e ven less structured ‘Where ha ve you been?’ from the parent, which may signal the start of a lecture, or the ‘Can I help you?’ from the emplo yee, slightly suspicious of the stranger wandering the office corridor. We ask questions, that is we interview, to f ind out about other people, their attitudes, beha viours and skills or to tap into the information they possess. We believe that what people say tells us a lot, an idea neatly encapsulated by Wrenn writing in 1949. He said, ‘Language is the expression of human personality in words . . .’

The place of interviews 3 The interview as such is perhaps just a specialised form of what humans spend large proportions of their time doing, ie talking to one another by means of questions and answers. Although specialised, interviews are common. The y are themselv es a suf ficiently signif icant part of human interaction that intervie wing skills may be regarded as a set of fundamental life skills, practised with v arying degrees of effectiveness but found at every turn.

PLAN OF THE BOOK In this chapter I re view some of the origins of intervie wing and comment on dif ferent types of intervie w, indicating an y links and differences. Comparing and contrasting intervie w methods and ideas will be a recurring theme throughout the book. It has struck me forcibly that, despite the common origins of dif ferent types of interview, links and contrasts are rarely dra wn and are little understood. This view is reinforced by my f inding, when preparing for this book, that books supposedly quite broad in matter such as Smart’ s Selection Interviewing (1983) or Taylor and O’Driscoll’s Structured Employment Interviewing (1995), seem rather to push a particular and surprisingly narrow range of techniques. In this chapter , too, I briefly consider aspects of interviews other than what is said, including so-called body language, as well as some other ways of finding out about people. Because selection intervie wing is undoubtedly so mainstream an application and a considerable point of focus for the lik ely reader of this book, I have devoted three chapters to that subject. I have tried to explain and, again, link the v arious techniques and question some of the routine assumptions. In Chapter 5 I deal with those intervie ws related to performance management and enhancement. Counselling interviews, which are the subject of the follo wing chapter may , of course, tak e place in w ork or other settings. I concentrate on the former but touch on some of the other uses as well. In Chapter 7 we mo ve to those intervie ws that are not necessarily focused upon the individual being interviewed but, rather, on using his or her responses to b uild up a body of information. This includes the specialised topic of survey interviewing. Chapter 8 is a review of a range of interview applications from the journalistic to the exit interview. Chapter 9 is reserv ed for vie ws about the future of intervie wing, again seeking to set it in the conte xt of o verall communications

4 Effective interviewing among people. A number of sample intervie w passages are gi ven throughout the te xt of the book, to illustrate the v arious types of interview discussed.

DEFINITIONS AND ORIGINS Interviews defined Roget’s Thesaurus lists interviews in connection with hearing, listening, enquiry, exam, examination, interrogate, along with heckle, f ind out, quiz, pick one’ s brains and conference, all of which seem to imply some degree of formality in discourse. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) tells us that the w ord comes from the French entrevoir, to have a glimpse of. It goes on to e xpound the early common use of the term in relation to meetings, particularly of a ceremonial nature, such as the meeting between Henry VIII and the French King Francis I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520. The journalistic use of the term is also quite widely co vered in the OED. Thus it gi ves the Palmall Gazette of 1884 as quite dispassionately stating, ‘Intervie wing is an instance of the di vision of labour . The interviewee supplies the matter, the interviewer the form.’ The very common modern usage of the term, in relation to selection and associated applications which e xists today alongside the journalistic interview, is of relati vely late origin. It is absent from many dictionaries prior to the 1960s, e ven though modern intervie w practice pre-dates that period by many decades. A generally accepted definition, in relation to modern use, w ould be as follows; ‘a meeting of people face to face, as for evaluating a job applicant.’ This specific form is given in Collins Dictionary of 1981.

Ancient roots The rather relentless questioning of one party by another or others, what we w ould no w call interrogation, is undoubtedly ancient. Among other examples the viva voce examination was, for centuries, the standard way of examining undergraduates in the universities. As well as still being used for this purpose quite generally for higher level de grees (as discussed in Chapter 8), this methodology has clearly much in common with modern selection intervie ws, particularly of the formal board or panel interview type.

The place of interviews 5 Formal questioning w as, of course, an inte gral part of the procedures used by the Inquisition set up by Pope Innocent III under the Congregation of the Holy Of fice in the thirteenth century . Such processes although, of course, often ab used, could result in unco vering substantial tracts of information. This is no where more vi vidly indicated than in Ladurie’s (1978) account of life in a French village, Montaillou. This detailed compilation is based upon inquisitorial examinations conducted by Jacques F ournier, Bishop of P amiers at that town and Carcassone in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. As we ha ve seen, though, the idea of the intervie w for selection purposes is more modern. Literary accounts of hirings in earlier times are sometimes amusing, as in Dick en’s portrayal of Pickwick’s acquisition of Samuel W eller, b ut rarely suggest a comprehensive method for exploring the merits of the candidate. ‘We want to know in the first place,’ said Mr Pickwick, ‘whether you have any reason to be discontented with your present situation.’ ‘Afore I answer that ’ere question, gen’lm’n,’ replied Mr Weller, ‘I should like to know, in the first place, whether you’re a-goin’ to purvide me with a better.’ A sunbeam of placid benevolence played on Mr Pickwick’s features as he said, ‘I have half made up my mind to engage you myself.’ ‘Have you though?’ said Sam. Mr Pickwick nodded in the affirmative. ‘Wages?’ inquired Sam. ‘Twelve pounds a year,’ replied Mr Pickwick. ‘Clothes?’ ‘Two suits.’ ‘Work?’ ‘To attend upon me and travel about with me and these gentlemen here.’ ‘Take the bill down’, said Sam emphatically. ‘I’m let to a single gentleman, and the terms is agreed upon.’

6 Effective interviewing The former lack of system in interviewing may, of course, be because patronage and recommendation were at one time a common basis for making hiring decisions. In The Three Musketeers, Dumas’ account of Dartagnan’s candidac y for the King’ s Musk eteers hinges upon a letter of introduction from his f ather to their captain M. de T reville. The occasion of the theft of the letter en route to Paris is one of the pivots of the novel, and its absence when the hero presents himself to de Treville is a significant mark against him. It w as, in f act, only in the second half of the nineteenth century that merit rather than patronage w as determined to be the criterion for recruitment by as signif icant an emplo yer as the British Ci vil Service. The Northcote T revelyan report of 1853–4 recommended that a Civil Service Commission be set up to o versee recruitment and promotion by competitive examination. This was made mandatory in 1870, but even then did not apply to the Foreign Office.

Modern instances Modern intervie wing can be seen as ha ving se veral strands. The need for formalised techniques in selection w as clearly recognised during the tw o world wars. The f irst of these ga ve a boost to paper and pencil psychometric instruments b ut little to intervie wing practice as such. World War II saw the origin of the War Office Selection Boards (WOSBs) with their emphasis on an o verall system in selection and with associated research flagging problems with unstructured intervie ws (see V ernon and P arry, 1949). Highly structured methods began to appear in the 1950s with the w ork of Clifton and his associates in the United States. The y arose after experimentation with other techniques in which perceptions of other people were used to gi ve clues to beha viour patterns (see Clifton et al , 1952). Specialist selection f irms such as Management Selection Limited (MSL) emer ged in the same decade, with their professional staf f spending much of their time conducting selection interviews. A signif icant b ut not generally ackno wledged strand in modern interviewing can be attrib uted to Sigmund Freud. He considered that much of what people said could be related to unconscious dri ves and motives, e xploring those as day-to-day occurrences in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901). In terms of modern counselling and related techniques the w ork of Carl Rogers is critical. He advocated the importance of objectivity and acceptance in the

The place of interviews 7 counselling interview process. His On Becoming a P erson (1961) is widely regarded as a central work in this connection. Recommendations on selection intervie w techniques started appearing in print in the 1950s (eg Rodger, 1951), and there are today a variety of books on the subject (e g Fletcher, 1986; Anderson and Shackleton, 1993). There is also a substantial research literature, with a survey as far back as the 1940s (W agner, 1949) being suf ficiently extensive to ha ve been dubbed by Anderson (1992) ‘a major re view’. In other uses of interviewing, too, advisory and research literature has been in e xistence for decades: for e xample, Oldfield’s (1953) booklet Fruitful Interviews gives advice to Welfare Officers on dealing with their clients. The use of intervie ws in staf f surv eys can be traced back to the 1930s, with Raphael’ s (1944) paper reflecting ten years of such work. The 1930s also sa w the adv ent of political polling intervie ws, with the w ork of Geor ge Gallup in the USA. Other intervie wing developments are more recent; for instance Mor gan, writing in 1993, claimed that the focus group technique, which we discuss in Chapter 7, was virtually unknown to social scientists five years previously. As the various methods and applications unfolded some developed along crossing or parallel lines, while others diverged.

INTERVIEWING PROCESSES Commonalities and variations Questions and answers are, of course, common to all intervie w processes but there are enormous v ariations thereafter. At one e xtreme we have the pre-determined set of questions, which may e xplore particular areas and could be seen as functioning rather lik e a checklist. This may apply to strings of questions used in selection or , indeed, in other forms of intervie wing such as the f inancial consultants’ f act-finding. (An outline of such an intervie w is given in Figure 1.1.) By contrast we have the more open intervie w formats as used in counselling. In these cases there may be a need for the intervie wer to probe, using a seemingly stray remark as a trigger for further follow-up and discussion. The memory load on the intervie wer in the counselling case is much more demanding than in the f act-finding case. An episode in a counselling interview is illustrated schematically in Figure 1.2 (page 9). It has been found that using the intervie w in selection does not

8 Effective interviewing

work very well and man y writers on intervie wing (eg Herriot, 1987; Bevan and Fryatt, 1988) ha ve speculated on reasons for its continued use. Awareness of limitations in selection intervie wing as commonly practised was one reason behind the de velopment of structured techniques, which are discussed in Chapter 3.

Who takes part Another variation in interviewing is in the number of people involved on one occasion in the intervie w process. Whereas by f ar the most

The place of interviews 9

common situation for an y purpose is the one-to-one intervie w, panel interviews are also widely used with numbers of interviewers ranging from three to perhaps eight. Another common approach is the two-toone interview. Here it is quite usual for one intervie wer to ask the questions and the other to tak e notes – roles which may be interchanged in the course of the interview. Another substantial v ariation is when there are one or tw o interviewers and a whole group of intervie wees. This is typical in the focus group intervie w, which may be used for mark et research purposes or in situations in which it is required to e xplore a job and develop a picture of competencies for it.

10 Effective interviewing There are, of course, different practices in different cultures and societies. For instance in Ne w Zealand, as e xemplified by the recruitment and appointment practices of the Uni veristy of Waikato, applicants are entitled to whanau support at panel intervie ws. Whanau members are friends or relatives of the candidate entitled to speak about the candidate at the interview and to ask the candidate’s questions of panel members.

CONSCIOUS VERSUS UNCONSCIOUS The attractive world of body language It is often claimed that a lar ge amount of information con veyed in communications relates to matters other than specif ic verbal content. This includes so-called para verbal beha viour, such as tone of v oice and hesitations in speech, and also non-v erbal beha viour such as posture. Experimental studies relating to posture go back as far as the 1930s with the w ork of James (1932). The implications of posture have also been e xamined in connection with clinical states for man y years (eg Deutsch, 1947). This whole f ield of body language is clearly intriguing to man y. Research by others such as Ar gyle (1975) sho ws that someone’ s physical gestures, mode of sitting and other aspects may tell us much about them. However, there is often confusion at the level of practical use as to what is f act and what is f iction in this, and v ery often interviewers will make fairly gross references to body language and dra w their o wn conclusions without this ha ving an y particular basis in research fact. Claims are often made as to the proportion of information deli vered by the v arious aspects of communication. W almsley (1994), for instance, quotes f igures to the ef fect that 55 per cent of communication is due to gestures and e xpression, 38 per cent to voice and only 7 per cent to w ords used. This appears to be deri ved from Mehrabian’s (1972) book on non-verbal communication, but the content of the study is unclear and indeed Mehrabian’ s w ork is not formally referenced by Walmsley. I have come across frequent, albeit even less specif ic, reference to this same f inding among the folklore of British management trainers and find it intriguing how such things can apparently become a received wisdom. In a re view of research on non-v erbal beha viour in intervie ws Arvey and Campion (1982) concluded that such beha viour did influ-

The place of interviews 11 ence the evaluations made by interviewers, but to a lesser e xtent than did candidates’ v erbal beha viour. Along the w ay the y came across quite wide v ariations in f indings. Ho wever, much of the research involved either quite drastic manipulation of non-v erbal behaviour in experiments. One such (McGo vern and T insley, 1978) manipulated energy level, eye contact, voice modulation and fluenc y together and not surprisingly found a dif ference in response to candidates e xhibiting high v ersus low levels on all of these v ariables. This study and many others in this f ield used videotapes of intervie ws; some used static photographs of people wearing dif ferent e xpressions (indeed the original w ork by James (1932) used photographs). It cannot be assumed of course that this w ould translate into real-life responses of interviewers in the same w ay. Little, if an y, of the research in this field has look ed at strictly objecti ve validation of inferences dra wn. For instance Gif ford et al (1985) in one study on the use of nonverbal cues by interviewers compared their ratings with self-rating by interviewees. Nor does the research clearly discriminate between non-verbal indications of short-term states – such as an anxious frame of mind during the intervie w – and long-term beha vioural patterns – a general inclination to be anxious. Altogether it may be that interviewers tend to judge some characteristics such as social skill quite consistently from non-v erbal behaviour, but this is dif ferent from these consistent or reliable judgements ef fectively predicting interviewees’ future behaviour.

Looking the part There is also the question of appearance and presentation, which is likely to include conscious and unconscious elements. At one extreme the interpretation of and weight put upon these aspects can become uncomfortably bound up with issues of equality of opportunity and prejudice against people, for e xample of a particular skin colour, age group, social class or re gion. At the other end of the scale, though, the clues to a person’ s transient state or mood indicated by their physical appearance may be seen as rele vant to their short-term success in a job . There is also the notion that someone who has not bothered to dress up for a selection intervie w may be careless about or uninterested in the job . However, the converse does not apply necessarily: the candidate who appears neatly brushed and pressed, perhaps after careful grooming and checking by a partner ,

12 Effective interviewing may not manage to present the same demeanor routinely . The danger of reading too much into such information is reflected in a distinction drawn by W ernimont and Campbell (1968) between signs and samples of behaviour. The former are unitary pieces of e vidence, say the grubby shoes or the hesitation over a relatively common technical term. Samples are representative sets of behaviour which can be seen as forming a clear pattern directly linked to requirements of a job. A range of conscious and unconscious indications is illustrated further in Figure 1.3.

OTHER EXCHANGES Before mo ving on to consider our main intervie w areas in detail in the following chapters, I will briefly note some other w ays of finding out about people, some of which do and some of which do not use questioning methods. In selection situations a v ariety of techniques are used. Quite often there is a parallel between a con ventional intervie w and what is contained in a CV or application form. In both cases people may indicate their w ork e xperience, formal qualif ications, their skills, what interests them about the post, and their e xpectations and personal circumstances. Sometimes the e xchanges in an initial intervie w are seen as merely e xploring points that are not clear from the CV . Thus interview and documentation can be re garded together. Counselling may also mak e use of documentary material, such as biographical questionnaires, in conjunction with interviewing processes. Psychometric tests typically used in w ork settings will e xplore abilities and personality v ariables. Reports on these may relate them to behaviours relevant to the job and as such the y may also parallel what w ould be attempted in an intervie w. In my book Using Psychometrics (Edenborough 1994) I indicated some of the areas where there may be such parallels. An interesting case is the use of the intervie w to follo w up on indications from a psychometric measure. This may apply in counselling or in selection where a clue to a line of enquiry may be gi ven by a psychometric test. Such follow-up might be conducted by an intervie wer skilled in the particular psychometric instrument, or by someone guided by the psychometric specialist with regard to what questions to ask. There are other exchanges which are, of course, undoubtedly interviews, b ut where the scope is v ery narro w. The standard security

The place of interviews 13

14 Effective interviewing questioning during check-in at an airport is an e xample of this type. (So too is the enquiry made of members of the audience entering the theatre to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show – ‘Do you ha ve an y rice?’, ‘Do you have a water pistol?’ – it being customary for patrons to bombard the players in this piece.)

SUMMARY 1. Interviews are widely applied and form a significant part of many interactions among people. They are sufficiently important for interviewing to be regarded as a life skill. 2. Originally applied to meetings and then to journalists’ enquiries, the term ‘interview’ in connection with selection and other applications is relatively modern. 3. The use of interviewing in selection, though now common, was not so in the past where patronage and personal recommendation were routine. 4. Systematic selection interviewing techniques with varying degrees of structure began to be developed in the 1950s with links back to methods used in World War II. 5. Counselling interview techniques can be traced back to Freud, with modern counselling owing much to Carl Rogers. 6. Limitations in the effectiveness of selection interviewing are well established, but interviews remain popular. 7. Although, regardless of application, the one-to-one face-to-face interview is the most common form, multiple interviewers and/or multiple interviewees will be found in some circumstances. 8. Verbal content is the main focus of attention in most interview situations, but non-verbal information, especially body language, is sometimes examined. 9. In selection and in counselling other sources of information, including psychometric tests, are often used together with interviews.

2 ‘Conventional’ selection interviewing INTERVIEWING IS POPULAR A strong assumption As indicated in Chapter 1, despite the f act that selection intervie ws are perhaps criticised more often than almost an y other area of management functioning, the y remain popular . The y are so popular that nearly everybody writing about interviewing refers to this f act in parallel with the reiteration of the problems and limitations associated with them. F or e xample Anderson and Shackleton (1993) describe the selection interview as ‘favoured and expected’. Eder and Ferris (1989) refer to the emphasis in practice on the unstructured interview as ‘one of the ironies of emplo yment practice’. In re viewing research on a wide range of methods used in selection, Robertson and Smith (1988) grouped conventional interviews in a low, but positive, band of v alidity. The y appeared in compan y there with references, personality questionnaires and interest in ventories. They were ahead of handwriting analysis, for which no v alidity w as demonstrated, but below assessment centres and grouped ability tests. Many such writers go on to indicate techniques that can impro ve what I refer to here as ‘con ventional’ interviewing. In this chapter I will also mak e a substantial commentary of this nature, indicating what can be done to enhance the ef fectiveness and accuracy of judging the qualities of candidates for jobs through this means. Ho wever before doing so it may be w orth considering both the popularity of the interview process and what I call a ‘strong assumption’.

16 Effective interviewing The strong assumption is simply that in intervie wing for selection some form of con ventional interview will almost al ways tak e place and be a central part of the selection process. By con ventional interview is meant one in which a person’ s past career and present interests are e xplored in a f airly unstructured w ay. This type of intervie w is usually conducted one-to-one and nearly al ways face-to-face. The interviewee will often be given the opportunity of asking questions of the interviewer who may , in an y case, v olunteer information about the opportunity and the employing organisation. This assumption is gi ven a further tightening twist by researchers on interviewing who often refer to the intervie ws they study without declaring them to be structured or unstructured. There is then a tacit, or perhaps v ery properly called ‘def ault’ assumption, that unless most clearly stated otherwise ‘intervie w’ equals ‘unstructured interview’ (see, for example, Ramsay et al, 1997). It is not uncommon for or ganisations to be v ery pernickety on the one hand about the costs the y may be incurring in, say , an associated activity such as recruitment adv ertising, but to be totally una ware of and unconcerned about the processes used and the amount of management time involved in conventional interviewing. Thus organisations may tolerate the time and ef fort involved in con ventional interviewing without really seeking an y particular re view of costeffectiveness or the adoption of good practice to improve matters. There is, of course, the question of what might be gained by other approaches. Despite my in volvement in psychometric procedures and my advocacy (Edenborough, 1994) of the range of information these can uncover, I am aware that psychometrics alone will not necessarily give the totality of information required for accurate selection. Thus a battery giving readouts on a wide range of personality dimensions and exploring intellectual functioning, even if supported by a documentary listing of qualif ications, would not tell one what the specific motivations were at the present time for a candidate. Nor would they indicate – and perhaps this is one of the major points in f avour of conventional interviews – ho w previous experience might bear on the present job . Thus the strong assumption seems likely to continue to be made. Nevertheless, the need for con ventional interviews has sometimes been challenged, often with enduring results. F or instance, in the 1960s Clarke set up an e xperiment in which half of the students for a psychology de gree course were selected on the basis of the Universities’ Central Council on Admissions (UCCA) application

‘Conventional’ selection interviewing 17 form, and no intervie w, while for the other half intervie ws were used. Tracking results in terms of academic grade performance o ver a f ive year period sho wed no dif ferences between the tw o groups. He concluded (Clarke, 1996) that the intervie w conducted added nothing, except in the case of mature students where additional information might be important. T oday, with f ar more students applying for university, places are frequently of fered without intervie ws ha ving been conducted.

Most interviewers are lousy, but I will interview There is a widely accepted vie w that intervie wing, lik e dri ving or making lo ve is something that most of us think we do better than most other people. Although there is no direct research to support this view, as opposed to the evident widespread commitment to interviewing, it is well sustained in myth and popular self-deception. Certainly, in my wide e xperience of discussing intervie w techniques, including de veloping a range of intervie w protocols and associated processes I can count fe w who w ould admit that the y were a lousy interviewer. I ha ve, though, found man y people who ha ve felt that their interview technique could be improved by training. Perhaps this is half a step along the path to better things. There is another point, though, which may be more telling than the apparently uni versal claim of superior skills in intervie wing. There seems to be a need for reassurance about the intervie wee, which can be gained by interaction with them, and which cannot be fulf illed by any other means! P art of this apparent requirement for direct kno wledge of the other person is undoubtedly related to liking. If you ha ve to work with someone o ver a period of time and you dislik e them on first acquaintance then this may be hard to re verse and feelings of dislike might better be dealt with at the intervie w stage rather than when the contract of employment has been signed. Quite often, liking will be related to aspects of sociability which some studies (eg Otis et al 1962) have indicated as being capable of correct prediction from interviews. Whether or not these same sociability f actors predict success on the job is another issue and man y other studies (see again Bevan and Fryatt, 1988) suggest that for many jobs it does not. Very often, of course, one is picking out a range of unconscious indicators which may not e ven be capable of being articulated as such. Today, in comparison with se veral years ago, fe w might admit

18 Effective interviewing that e ven though the y may not actually require candidates to ha ve been to Oxbridge, the y ought to be able to present themselv es as though they had. The con ventional interview represents the best w ay to e xplore such impressions. These ideas may be seen as related to the notion of implicit personality theory: people undoubtedly ha ve different subjecti ve models and vie ws of personality , so man y are inclined to use only their own model in understanding another person – and how better to test them against that than by meeting them in the interview? The pervasive nature of prejudice in intervie wing and the f act that it may be applied unconsciously by the intervie wer were both partly demonstrated in a study by A wosunle and Doyle (2001). In a laboratory setting they played tapes of intervie ws to white and black raters. The content of questions and answers w as the same in each case b ut those rated as candidates had either Afro-Caribbean or East London accents. The black raters rated the black candidates higher than the white and vice v ersa. The authors sa w this as sho wing potential for ‘institutionalised racism’ in intervie wing, noting the f indings as particularly disappointing with most of the rater subjects being students ‘at a uni versity which tries v ery hard to celebrate di versity’. The unconscious influence of what w ould, objectively, be e vident as irrelevant f actors w as found in a study by DeGroot and Moto widlo (1999). The y found a positi ve relationship between a number of aspects of intervie wees’ v oice quality, such as pitch and rate of speech with interviewers’ ratings. There is also, of course, the question of specif ic hypothesis-testing. Sometimes in chains of intervie ws one person will feel that the y have inadequately e xplored a particular aspect or there is some lingering doubt that requires further in vestigation. The second intervie wer then is char ged with e xploring this. This may apply , too, in an intervie w following receipt of a CV ; does a gap in the sequence of emplo yment reflect long sick leave, unemployment or a typographical error?

Two perspectives One of the sources of apparent lousiness in selection intervie wing may arise from tw o quite mark edly dif ferent perspecti ves on the whole interview process. In one there is a push for a rational and systematic gathering of data about the candidate, with a step-by-step building up of the picture. This approach is particularly strongly

‘Conventional’ selection interviewing 19 reflected in the whole of structured intervie w methodology, which is the subject of the ne xt chapter. However, a systematic approach also colours man y ef fective conventional interview practices discussed below. An alternative view is that the interview is just as much about selling the emplo ying or ganisation as it is about f inding out about the candidate. Central to this vie w is the idea of the o verall fit between employer and emplo yee. Associated with this is the notion of the value of each party ha ving the opportunity to gain an intuiti ve feel for the other , and that rigidity in intervie w processes se verely limits this opportunity. Many psychologists writing on intervie w research seem to recognize the superiority af forded by structure in intervie wing. As Bo yle (1997) points out though, unstructured intervie ws conducted by untrained people who don’ t know what the y are looking for are still ‘too common’. Yet there are some who defend the unstructured position. Thus Oli veira (2000) discusses the vie w that there is a logic to unstructured interviewing with some managers able to apply implicit knowledge based on wide experience of their own organization when they opt for unstructured interviewing. (It may perhaps be questioned as to whether their ‘opting’ is in itself conscious or , more lik ely, the pursuit of an implicit and possibly institutionalized approach.) These differing models have been labelled by Anderson (1992) as the objecti vist-psychometric and the subjecti vist social-perception perspectives. He sees the distinction as important in shaping the research that has been done on interviews. It is also important, too, in shaping the practical approach tak en to conducting intervie ws, even if not clearly acknowledged as such. Thus those with a strong objectivist-psychometric approach w ould see the subjecti vist-social perception approach as w oolly. Those who propound or practise the latter tend to see the objecti vist-psychometric approach as o verly remote, or, as one recruiter put it to me on a structured intervie w course, ‘Something dreamed up by HR people and nothing to do with the real b usiness of recruitment’. Gi ven that these tw o different positions are not often clearly articulated – in these or equi valent terms – it is perhaps not surprising that the perception is more often just that others do it wrong. (As Dr Johnson said, ‘orthodoxy is my doxy; heterodoxy is another man’ s doxy’.) However, it is also possible for the tw o approaches to operate together , particularly when multiple interviews are used.

20 Effective interviewing Many of the observ ations belo w can be seen as reflecting the objectivist-psychometric perspective primarily, the subjectivist-social perception approach being necessarily less capable of prescription. The bad practices as represented particularly by the horror stories at the end of this chapter are to be avoided from whatever perspective or model one might be operating.

HOW TO DO CONVENTIONAL INTERVIEWING Setting and settling Arvey and Campion, in their 1982 re view of emplo yment interviewing, indicate a v ariety of f actors separate from the intervie w structure as such which need to be considered in an intervie w programme. These include the role of the intervie w in the selection system and the proportion of intervie wees lik ely to be hired. The y also include the physical setting. A controlled en vironment in which to conduct an interview is needed, and this is something which nearly all writers on interviewing recognise and acknowledge. There is, though, sometimes debate on ho w much time should be spent in social niceties or chitchat before the intervie w starts. If this is totally ignored then the start of the process may seem o verly abrupt: if it is protracted before the interview proper starts the intervie wee may w onder if a range of enquiries about her week end activities is actually a subtle part of the interview and may be unnecessarily on her guard. There is some value in checking out immediately preceding acti vities. People who ha ve had a difficult journey may be o verly focused upon this if the y do not have the chance to clear the issue. Those who ha ve been passed on from another party may not necessarily have had their expectations set as to what is to happen on this particular occasion or what is to follow. Again, some scene-setting as part of the introductory process can be valuable. Certainly freedom from interruption should be assured, both as a courtesy and in terms of maintaining an appropriate de gree of concentration by both parties, if the interview is to be taken seriously.

Question types and formats There are a lot of recommendations in writings on intervie wing about question types with many firm and sometimes contradictory statements being made. Setting aside the structured intervie w cases (which we

‘Conventional’ selection interviewing 21 will be exploring in greater detail in the next chapter) the following are some of the points that arise.

Leading questions A leading question is one in which the response is assumed. ‘Don’ t you agree that . . . ’ would be the typical introduction to this type of question, which may go on to state something like, ‘. . .you should be able to do e verything your staf f can’. The possibilities open to the interviewee f aced with such a question are se veral. He may simply acquiesce, in which case little is gained, or he may contradict the interviewer. He may see it as something of a challenge and re gard a contradiction as what is required re gardless of his o wn feelings. It may be that the topic is something that he has not considered before and putting the question in this rather blunt w ay may force him to express some vie w while in reality he holds none in particular . A more neutral question w ould be, ‘Some people say that a manager should be able to do e verything that their staf f can, while others say that this is not necessary and may incline the manager to get trapped in detail. How do you feel about that?’

Closed questions Similar difficulties arise with other forms of closed question, ie those that only admit of specif ic answers such as ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Ho wever, although many writers and teachers of intervie wing practice in veigh against these, the y can be particularly useful in clearing particular points out of the w ay. As such the y may relate to matters of f act not already established, perhaps through prior documentation. Examples of useful closed questions are, ‘When did you w ork on product X?’, ‘How many people reported to you?’, ‘Did you ha ve direct or functional responsibility for the accountants in di vision Y?’, ‘Ho w long did it take to develop that plan?’

Open questions Open questions are often recommended by writers on intervie wing (eg Lewis 1992) as a means of generating information. These in vite views: ‘What are your opinions on…?’, ‘Ho w did you f ind X…?’, ‘What was it like at…?’ These are likely to make up the effective bulk of most conventional interviewing. However, they do suffer from the danger that the y may

22 Effective interviewing lead to an o verly discursive response by the intervie wee. Variations may be made on the most open format so as to narro w the scope somewhat, as in: ‘T ell me about the challenges you ha ve f aced at work recently’, and ‘What sort of people did you interact with when you were selling product y?’

Probing and challenging questions There is also the probing question, which may be used for getting further information. It may in itself be open or closed. Examples of the former are ‘T ell me about that’ or ‘Ho w’ or ‘Why’ questions. An example of a more closed probe w ould be, ‘W ere you selling to the personnel function or to the line?’ It is sometimes said that too man y probes can mak e people feel that the y are being interrogated, and so feel uncomfortable. This is also the view of the questions or responses actually designed to put people on the spot. These include ‘I disagree with that’, or ‘Why do you hold that vie w?’ One text on interviewing (Leeds, 1988) recommends asking candidates if a particular statement that the y ha ve just made could itself be directly check ed out with referees. There is little reason for going do wn this track and such an approach should be reserved for cases where there may be a real question of doubt as to the truthfulness of the respondent.

Reflecting Another form is the reflecting question, in which the interviewer plays back to the interviewee what he has said. In f act it is often likely to be in the form of a statement rather than strictly a question as such. Sometimes this is done to cover matters of fact, as in the following: Interviewee: Then I w as given a larger group to manage, which meant I just could not stay as close to the coal-f ace day-to-day. Management by wandering about alone was just not enough, so that I really found myself obliged to clarify reporting lines and put in regular review procedures. Interviewer: So having to handle a lar ger group of people meant you had to structure your approach to management much more? Alternatively reflection may turn more upon matters of feeling, as in the following: Interviewee: At that time I had just mo ved further a way from the office, which I might not ha ve done if I had kno wn about the

‘Conventional’ selection interviewing 23 changes in w orking hours. I found I often had to cope with tra vel delays quite late in the e vening. It seemed that no one in the company had thought of that. My immediate boss, who didn’ t have the same sort of family responsibilities as I had, didn’t want to know and Personnel just quoted the rule book. I might ha ve been more inclined to stay if someone had sho wn interest or at least recognised the problem, instead of that I seemed just to be fighting the company all the time and that didn’ t seem lik e a good basis for a long-term working relationship. Interviewer: So you felt that the company was unsympathetic to you? In both cases the interviewer’s response shows that they are listening, thereby b uilding and reinforcing rapport. In the f irst passage the interviewer’s response is lik ely to lead to a further e xposition by the candidate as to what he did, and in particular to result in quite clear statements about his own particular role in the process of structuring. A closed question such as ‘Did you actually decide that yourself or were you told to?’ could lead to defensi veness and/or a stock answer, ‘It w as my decision’, rather than the fuller e xposition prompted by the reflection. A simple open question, such as ‘Tell me more’, might well lead to a discursi ve exposition. It is not clear whether the more required is about the problem arising from the increased staf f or the solution to it, or both. ‘T ell me more about what you did’ is more directive without being as lik ely to cue the intervie wee as the closed ‘Did you actually . . . or . . .’ above. In the case of the intervie wee with problems of w orking patterns and tra vel, the reflection, although neutral and entirely non-e valuative, could serv e to le gitimise the feelings of not being sympathised with. This is lik ely to lead to further e xpressions of feeling, which may gi ve a useful slant on the candidate’ s tendenc y to become stressed or upset. A closed question at this stage, such as ‘Did you leave because of that?’, is likely to shut down this line of enquiry. An open question in the form ‘How did you feel about that?’ may also be less powerful here. Although it does open the door to further e xpressions of feeling it may suggest to the intervie wee that her feelings, which she might see as to some e xtent ob vious, ha ve not been adequately received. The reflection more clearly recognises the feelings that have been voiced. The question of reflection in intervie ws is returned to again in Chapter 6 on counselling intervie ws. In con ventional selection inter-

24 Effective interviewing views a mix of open and closed questions and reflecti ve statements is likely to be most useful.

The use of CVs and application forms Very often an intervie wer will ha ve access to a CV or application form in adv ance of conducting an intervie w. Carefully used these may be valuable props. Expressions of interest in a particular job or career phase may establish rapport and also establish an area for exploration of certain skill areas. Thus if a candidate has held one post in which she had responsibility for lar ge numbers of staf f and another in which she was part of a small corporate think-tank, exploration of the former is lik ely to yield the more fruitful information about the candidate’s abilities in people management. Getting her to contrast her vie ws on the tw o roles may indicate the type of w ork that satisfies her more and so could pro vide a fairly sustained source of motivation. The initial e xamination of CV or application form information may provide a variety of other clues for areas to explore. These could include claims of special achie vements on the one hand or , on the other, gaps or inconsistencies that need to be clarif ied. However, to make a rigid re view of CV and application form content as such in the interview may simply be to reproduce unnecessarily the information contained therein.

Information-giving There is quite a lot of debate about using the intervie w as a setting for giving information to the intervie wee. Indeed another reason for the e vident popularity of the con ventional intervie w is that it does give the intervie wee the occasion to ask questions. If there is a constant to and fro of questioning though, an y line that the interviewer is pursuing is prone to lapse. Attention may be brok en and the interviewee may, himself, gain information for use in response to questions in later parts of the intervie w. Also although informationgiving can be seen as a standard aspect of the subjecti vist socialperception vie w of the intervie w, discussed earlier , there is a clear potential for a form of mutual halo effect, in which each party comes to a satisfying b ut inaccurate vie w of the other . This is illustrated diagramatically in Figure 2.1.

‘Conventional’ selection interviewing 25

26 Effective interviewing One approach to a voiding some of these dif ficulties is to reserv e set times in the interview for giving information. If there are intended to be a series of intervie ws in a half day or day this may be done in the form of a presentation or in the form of setting up question and answer sessions for intervie wees. This is one w ay in which objectivist-psychometric and subjecti vist social-perception approaches may to some degree be combined.

INTENTION AND PRACTICE Common difficulties Many mistakes can occur in interviews and perhaps one of the most common is just not to tak e enough trouble o ver the setting and stage management arrangements. It is common for intervie wees to appear unaware of the position of a particular intervie w in a whole recruitment process, who they are to see, or an y special preparation that the y are meant to ha ve undertak en. If a CV has not been requested in advance, letting people kno w if you do or do not w ant to see one at the intervie w is courteous. It may a void candidates fumbling in briefcases and trying to tak e you line for line through a written document that you do not particularly w ant to peruse at that stage. Freedom from interruption seems more dif ficult to achieve than to intend, and actually unplugging the telephone may be more ef fective than any form of electronic gating or briefing of colleagues. The interview process is about an e xchange of ideas and there is sometimes discomfort on the part of the intervie wer if there is a pause. The typical w ay of f illing such a pause is to restate the question. Of course if the question is restated it is lik ely to add little to clarity and may even confuse. Another common approach is the portmanteau question, which puts forw ard a series of propositions. A portmanteau question followed by a pause – because it is confusing – follo wed by a restatement of the portmanteau issue(s) may leave the interviewee feeling that she is no w being required directly to demonstrate intellectual powers rather than re view, perhaps, some aspect of her career or experience! An ef fort to co ver all aspects of an issue in the question may confuse:

‘Conventional’ selection interviewing 27 Interviewer: Can you tell me ho w much responsibility you had in that project? That is, were you in char ge of planning and execution or just, you know, part of the project? Candidate: (pause) Um, er, well. Interviewer: Sometimes there can be a split responsibility , or maybe dif ferent responsibilities at dif ferent times for dif ferent things, say in a comple x project with se veral phases, so did you have the whole thing all the w ay through or w as it the dif ferent parts at different times?

In the example in the box above it was probably not necessary for the interviewer to add an ything after saying the w ord ‘project’ for the first time. Another area of some debate and contention is that of note-taking during interviews. Some interviewers – I suspect sometimes the lazy ones – excuse themselves from ever taking a note on the grounds that it w ould be distracting to the intervie wee and mak e it dif ficult for them to maintain e ye contact and otherwise sho w that the y were listening1. Certainly the head do wn approach and constant scribbling all the w ay through may be disconcerting and the skill of making appropriate notes in a con ventional interview is something that will have to be practised. Note-taking does appear to aid accurac y. Schuh (1978) manipulated note-taking – permitting it or not – and interruptions, and found the highest accurac y when note-taking w as permitted and there were no interruptions. Perhaps the largest area of difficulty is actually that of listening. It is exacerbated in those situations where there is no pre-planning or in which there is a constant feeding of information back to the inter viewee rather than assimilating what has been said by the interviewee. 1

It might be ar gued that the distinction between the tw o perspecti ves discussed above would be reflected in the de gree of rigour applied to notetaking. This is not necessarily the case. Reference to an ef fective record may subsequently help clarify or remind the intervie wer of the feelings experienced at the time. Letting the intervie wees see that their vie ws and questions are being noted may instil more conf idence about the seriousness with which their candidature is being tak en than if it appears that memory is to be the entire record of a one-and-a-half hour discussion.

28 Effective interviewing Another problem area lies in the physical setting of the intervie w room. What is interesting here is that dif ferent sources actually disagree as to the appropriateness of different room layouts for conventional interviewing. While most seem to agree that f acing directly across the table is uncomfortable and challenging, there is considerable disagreement as to whether it is or is not appropriate to intervie w across the corner of the table, sitting in comfy chairs or at round tables. Some of the views on arrangements are illustrated in Figure 2.2. On top of these dif ficulties and problems there are, of course, a range of horror stories. While some of these are undoubtedly the matter of myth rather than reality – such as the comic incident portrayed in Richard Gordon’ s Doctor in the House in which the unfortunate candidate mistak es the gender of a w oman attired in a rather masculine style and loses his chances of appointment by calling her Sir – there are man y real ones. The stories in the follo wing section are from my o wn experience or those of immediate colleagues, all b ut one as relayed at the time of their happening. The generality of such experiences is reflected, too, in Anderson and Shackleton’ s (1993) speculation that all their readers w ould be able to recount personal experience of poor treatment by a selection interviewer.

INTERVIEWING HORROR STORIES 1. A candidate w as interviewed by the personnel director for an internal post on a day on which major emplo yee-relations trouble was anticipated and indeed brok e. An hour’s interview was interrupted no fewer than 13 times by phone calls or people coming in with messages. The intervie wer did apologise for the disruption but did not of fer to reschedule the meeting to an occasion when he could do a proper job of it! 2. Two managers were interviewing a candidate who used a piece of jargon, ‘At that time I w as using the gobbledygook softw are system for project management’ he said. ‘What is that?’ ask ed one interviewer. ‘Surely you kno w that’ ask ed the second interviewer of his colleague. The f irst interviewer glowered ‘Yes I do, but I want to see if she does’ he said! 3. It was the university milk round. A bored interviewer saw that his next candidate w as studying music and French and he w as cross

‘Conventional’ selection interviewing 29

30 Effective interviewing with the sifting process for ha ving produced someone so ob viously unsuited for work in a technically-oriented compan y. ‘I see you study music and French’ he said. The candidate nodded enthusiastically. ‘Then sing the Marseillaise’ the intervie wer requested. 4. Interviewers not being present themselv es for the appointment arranged on their behalf is almost commonplace in some or ganisations. The ne xt story unfortunately is a not atypical e xchange which actually took place with a candidate and one of the world’s leading f irms of e xecutive search consultants. A candidate presents himself (as requested by the sign at the of fice entrance) to the security of ficer on the front desk. ‘I am John Bloggs to see Sue Smith’. The security of ficer looks through lists. ‘Ha ve you got an appointment? I’ ll phone through, what did you say your name w as, look she ain’ t here, they’re sending someone out, do you want to leave a card or something? Are you sure you’ve got an appointment? What did you say your name was?’ 5. The two-person interviewing team had discussed the forthcoming day’s interviews rather too enthusiastically the night before. One, rather the w orse for wear , gulped some black cof fee and then launched stoically into some questions. The other intervie wer picked up a pen and made notes, wincing at the sound of shuffling paper. After a quarter of an hour the note-tak er nudged the questioner and whispered in their ear , ‘You’ve just repeated your first three questions’. 6. In an intervie w on W all Street one of tw o interviewers stood up and leaned o ver the desk to wards the candidate and said, ‘If I picked you up by your collar and threw you against that wall over there what w ould you do?’ He replied, ‘Nothing’. When ask ed, ‘Why not?’, he said ‘Because you’ re bigger than me’. The candidate w as later told that he didn’ t get the job because he didn’ t have the killer instinct. 7. A woman interviewed for a job in an ice-cream factory was asked when her ne xt menstrual period w as due. (This story does date back to 1961: it couldn’t happen today – or could it?)

‘Conventional’ selection interviewing 31

SUMMARY 1. Conventional unstructured interviewing with a career history focus is very widely practised, despite quite general recognition of its limitations. 2. The opportunity to make a direct personal assessment of a candidate and to gauge personal liking, whether explicitly or implicitly, appears to underpin the continued use of the conventional interview. 3. The objectivist-psychometric view of interviewing stresses the need for hard evidence gathered in a systematic fashion. The contrasted subjectivist-social perception approach stresses the need for gaining an overall intuitive feel for candidates as well as selling the employing organisation to them. 4. The overall handling of the interview should include clarity as to what is to be expected there and at any subsequent stages of selection. The environment should be controlled and the interview conducted without interruptions. 5. Leading questions should generally be avoided and challenging questions used sparingly. Open questions are effective in opening up an area for discussion or in exploring a candidate’s views without giving out clues to looked-for answers. Closed questions may aid clarification of specific facts, but may limit scope for establishing a candidate’s views. Reflecting responses back to a candidate can help clarify facts or encourage the revelation of feelings. 6. The use of CVs or application forms may help direct interview questioning fruitfully. 7. Giving information freely in the interview may underpin rapport, but may disrupt information-gathering as well as cueing the interviewee as to desired responses. 8. Common difficulties in interviewing are experienced with: Ɂ

the stage management or control of the process

Ɂ

handling pauses

Ɂ

framing questions clearly

Ɂ

note-taking

Ɂ

listening

Ɂ

physical layout of the interview room.

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

3 Structured interviewing in selection SCOPE OF STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS Structured interviews run all the w ay from simply more or ganised approaches to conducting the conventional biographically based interviews, as described in the last chapter , to instruments which, in their form, lie v ery close to what w ould normally be re garded as psychometric measures. A major study of interviewing in selection (Wiesner and Cronshaw, 1988) found much higher le vels of v alidity for structured versus unstructured methods. It is possible that the lar ge differences the y found still understated the situation with re gard to interview practice. To be in a position e ven to be included in a study implies some de gree of system, whereas man y emplo yment interviews are still practised along the lines of the horror stories included at the end of the last chapter . (Thus McDaniel et al (1994) in a metaanalytic study reported ‘even the unstructured interview was found to have a respectable le vel of v alidity’. Ho wever their conclusions appear to have been based on public sector interviews with fairly clear criteria and often the use of rating forms ie a de gree of structure. Indeed, the y state that ‘the typical intervie w in the pri vate sector is likely to be substantially less structured...’.) Perhaps the earliest, b ut still widely-used form of structured interview, is the approach adv ocated by Rodger and encapsulated in his Seven-Point Plan (NIIP, 1951) (see box). This w as a way of planning an approach to an intervie w to ensure that a number of aspects of a person, seen as generally of rele vance, were explored. A comparable scheme was the so-called f ive-fold grading system of Munro-Fraser (1954).

34 Effective interviewing

THE RODGER SEVEN-POINT PLAN 1. Physical make-up Have the candidates any defects of health or physique that may be of occupational importance? How agreeable is their appearance, bearing and speech? 2. Attainments What type of education have they had? How well have they done educationally? What occupational training and experience have they had already? How well have they done occupationally? 3. General intelligence How much general intelligence can they display? How much general intelligence do they ordinarily display? 4. Special aptitudes Have they any marked mechanical aptitude? Manual dexterity? Facility in the use of words or figures? Talent for drawing or music? 5. Interests To what extent are their interests intellectual? Practical? Constructional? Physically active? Social? Artistic? 6. Disposition How acceptable do they make themselves to other people? Do they influence others? 7. Circumstances What are their domestic circumstances? What do other members of their family do for a living? Are there any special openings available for them?

THE FIVE-FOLD GRADING SYSTEM 1. Impact on others Physical make-up, appearance, speech and manner. 2. Acquired qualifications Education, vocational training, work experience. 3. Innate abilities Natural quickness of comprehension and aptitude for learning.

Structured interviewing in selection 35 4. Motivation The kinds of goals set by the individual, his or her consistency and determination in following them up and success in achieving them. 5. Adjustment Emotional stability, ability to stand up to stress and ability to get on with people.

Increasingly, with the le gal requirement to a void discrimination, and the emphasis on achie ving ‘political correctness’, commenting on physical make-up as advocated by these schemes could be regarded as suspect. Armstrong (1995) refers to the use of schemes such as these as typically following the specification of requirements. Even so, their prescriptive nature in re gard to areas lik ely to be irrele vant could operate against an y careful requirement specif ication, in addition to being seen as intrusi ve or potentially discriminating. T oday man y employers will, in f act, proscribe questioning in areas relating to background where the specif ic rele vance of these has not been confirmed. (Arvey (1979) reviewing legal cases involving discrimination in the USA found that one consistent theme w as the questioning of women about marital status, childcare and related issues, areas of inquiry not put to their male counterparts.)

The focus on behaviour With other forms of structured intervie w there is less emphasis on building up a general picture of a person and more on e xploring specific behaviour. Thus in the interviews to be discussed under criterion-based and critical incident methods belo w it is e vidence of relevant behaviour that is sought directly . Interestingly, though, in what can be regarded as the most adv anced form of structure in intervie wing and which is being called here the structured psychometric interview or SPI, the emphasis again may be in some cases a way from specific beha viour and more to wards tendencies to beha ve. These latter are established in a variety of ways including specific instances, and also by asking a range of questions aimed at tapping into attitudes of which a person may be only slightly or scarcely at all conscious. Thus structured interviews would most generally be seen as lining up with the objecti ve-psychometric model of intervie wing, using Anderson’s (1992) distinction between that and the subjecti ve and

36 Effective interviewing social-perception approach discussed in the last chapter. However, the SPI may sometimes in effect break this distinction down by spanning the two sides of the divide. The f act that structured intervie w techniques co ver such a broad church is a complicating factor for those seeking to evaluate methods or decide on appropriate means to use in selection. Thus we ha ve on the one hand methods where the specific content of the interview has been arrived at by careful and painstaking research and where those using the intervie w are required to go through rigorous training which can last up to a year. On the other hand we ha ve the output of what might be a Friday afternoon huddle to discuss areas for questioning and not back ed at all by an y form of training or check on standards. Although it is contended here that structured intervie w methods may give considerable benefits and increments in accurac y that can mak e them, perhaps, the most cost-ef fective of all methods likely to be used in selection, their design and use requires considerable care. Certainly, as in fact with conventional selection interviews, the warning ‘rubbish in, rubbish out’ applies with some force here, so we turn ne xt to a range of approaches to producing structured interviews. As the particular case of the structured psychometric interview (SPI) is gone into in considerable depth in the last part of this chapter only passing reference will be made to it in the following section. Of the methods and concepts referred to here, several have applications elsewhere, too. Thus we shall refer again to the repertory grid in Chapters 6 and 8 and to focus groups in Chapter 7, where job specif ication is also again referred to.

DERIVING INTERVIEW MODELS The repertory grid One of the most powerful techniques established for determining relevant dimensions to explore in interviews is the repertory grid. This is by no means used exclusively for definitions to be fed into interviewing practice and it is a methodology that can be used in connection with assessment centres or counselling situations. It has been employed in a wide v ariety of settings with applications including those in the f ield of mark et research and e ven in areas such as the

Structured interviewing in selection 37 derivation of dimensions to describe the handling characteristics of military aircraft. The repertory grid w as developed by K elly (1955) in connection with his Personal Construct Theory . Much has been written about it since, a lot of it highly technical in nature, b ut Bannister and Mair’ s (1968) book is still a good general te xt on the subject. The repertory grid (or rep. grid as it is often abbreviated) is a way of sorting out the concepts or constructs a person uses to describe a particular area of interest. In the case of selection the area of interest would be the characteristic behaviours or attitudes relating to a particular job. The method in volves getting those who are kno wledgeable about the particular area – the job, in this particular case – to go through a sorting process in which they can articulate the relevant dimensions. A variety of tasks may be used for this purpose b ut a simple and the most commonly used one is a card-sorting method. First of all the interviewee is asked to list a number of people currently performing the job or a similar one. Numbers from 8 to 12 are frequently used. The indi viduals are identif ied by the respondent to his satisf action with a number being written do wn on a separate card to represent each indi vidual. The intervie wer then selects sets of three cards, usually initially at random. The intervie wee is ask ed to group the cards in ways which indicate how two of the individuals represented are alike and different in some way from the third. The responses are noted. A second set of three cards is drawn and the process repeated. Further dra wings are carried out either until all possible combinations are e xhausted or until no ne w discriminating dimensions emerge. Thus very often part w ay through the interviewer is rapidly assessing which fresh combinations are lik ely to yield interesting distinctions. Once the drawings of cards is complete the interviewer goes on to request the intervie wee to rank-order the indi viduals who are being discussed. This rank-ordering is in terms of their effectiveness in the job of relevance. The result of this is then explored further to resolve any ties gi ven. Specific behaviours are then e xplored further, building upon the distinctions originally rendered and looking at why particular beha viour patterns are important. Repetition of this process with tw o or three people who are kno wledgeable about the role concerned can fairly rapidly home in on the dimensions of relevance. An e xample of part of a repertory grid intervie w output is given below.

38 Effective interviewing

A repertory grid interview Interviewer: We are discussing the job of a level X manager in finance. Could you please identify for yourself eight le vel X managers whom you know. You should have a spread of capabilities among them. Write down their names or initials on a piece of paper for your own reference, and then just number them from one to eight. Okay? Interviewee: Okay. Interviewer: Now I have a set of cards also numbered one to eight to correspond to the people on your list. I am going to dra w three cards at a time and show them to you. I want you to tell me a way in which two of them are alike but different from the third. Interviewee: Okay. Interviewer: Here are the first three, numbers two, three and five. Can you tell me a w ay in which tw o of them are alik e, but different from the third? Interviewee: Well, two and three are well or ganised with good attention to detail. Number f ive is, I guess, more entrepreneurial in style, and doesn’t pay much attention to detail. Interviewer: And the next three are numbers four, six and eight? Interviewee: Four and six are strong people people, if you kno w what I mean, people managers I suppose, while number eight is much more focused on tasks. Interviewer: And what about numbers one, seven and five? Interviewee: One and f ive are quite strate gic. Se ven tak es a much more short-term operational view. From the questioning indicated here it appears that being or ganised, managing people and thinking strategically are three of the dimensions that the intervie wee uses in thinking about f inancial managers in the company. Further exploration will yield further dimensions and re veal which the interviewee sees as most important. Comparison with other interviewees will show the degree of agreement among them.

Critical incident techniques In this method the emphasis is upon those incidents that ha ve been significant or critical in determining the success or otherwise in the

Structured interviewing in selection 39 job. By e xploring these important turning points one may b uild a picture of those behaviours that are required for effective performance in the role, and where lack of the capacity to cope with a particular type of incident w ould be especially disabling. These situations then form the basis for structuring the intervie w itself as discussed later in this chapter. The method w as developed by Flanagan (1954) follo wing earlier work (Flanagan, 1947), with W orld War II American bomber cre ws. Then, in what today w ould probably be called b usiness process reengineering, attempts were made to study the v arious activities and processes that were critical to a bombing mission. In his 1954 paper Flanagan defined an incident as ‘any observable human activity that is sufficiently complete in itself to permit inferences and predictions to be made about the person performing that act’. He also set out systematic protocols for e xploring incidents. Those questioned clearly needed to ha ve detailed acquaintance with the incidents and were labelled subject matter experts (SMEs).

Job specification and job descriptions A variety of methods are available for deriving job specifications and writing job descriptions. Some of these relate to scoping or sizing the job for remuneration purposes (see Chapter 7) b ut these themselv es will, of course, be of rele vance in determining the types of beha viour that may be required. Thus someone with financial responsibility over a very large budget will require to ha ve those skills which reflect the prudent handling of mone y. Someone required to undertak e longrange resource planning is lik ely to need to be able to conceptualise strategically and comprehend the potential interaction of a v ariety of issues some time into the future. Sometimes job descriptions are deri ved directly from an initial specification of or ganisational structure and a def inition of areas of responsibility alone and do not give direct indications of behavioural requirements. Sometimes in a job description there is a rather long list of responsibilities and accountabilities. These may need to be considered carefully in terms of the required beha viours that the y imply. There may need to be a process of grouping of areas of acti vity very specific to an or ganisation before a clear enough picture of the beha viours can be gathered to construct an intervie w. Such a process is illustrated overleaf.

40 Effective interviewing

JOB DESCRIPTION FLEET MANAGER (EXTRACT) 1. Good contacts in the motor trade and, preferably, the finance houses. 2. Familiarity with practical aspects of maintenance workshop management. 3. Ability to interact with colleagues at all levels. 4. As a major budget holder, financial planning experience is essential. 1 and 3 may imply communication skills. 2 and 4 may imply control and review skills. 1, 2 and 3 may imply negotiation skills. 2 may imply staff motivation skills.

It may be dif ficult to produce an ef fective structured intervie w if the number of areas indicated in the job description is lar ge. Similarly, whether or not a job description is produced, if a checklist of beha vioural descriptions is presented to a recruiting manager it is not uncommon for nearly every area to be endorsed as relevant to the job. Clearly this complicates rather than helps the task of identifying relevant behaviours. The essential simplifying process that techniques for studying and analysing jobs are meant to pro vide is neatly captured by Algera and Greuter (1988). They see this role as one of interconnecting between criteria of job performance and predictors of that performance, including interviews.

The role of competencies The term competency sometimes seems to be simply a modern version of what may otherwise be referred to as dimensions, criteria, traits or even themes of behaviour. Its current usage can be attrib uted to Bo yatzis (1982), who def ined it as: a capacity that e xists in a person that leads to beha viour that meets the job demands within the

Structured interviewing in selection 41 parameters of the organisational environment and that, in turn, brings about desired results. A similar def inition from Evarts (1987) will be explored here. It runs as follows: A competency is an underlying characteristic of a person which is causally related to ef fective or superior performance in a job or role. The various aspects of the definition are all of importance. Thus by referring to an underlying characteristic we mean something that is likely to be sustained, repeated and reliable o ver time. It is not however necessarily implied that this should be something absolutely fundamental to the person. Indeed, debates about the v arious contributions of nature and nurture do not need to be entered into when considering competencies. The term underlying and its implication of behaviour that is repeated is meant to remo ve one from the arena of superficial judgements. F or example the person who appears with a button missing from her jack et at an intervie w may be habitually scruffy and pay insuf ficient attention to her personal presentation, or she may have been unfortunate enough to have caught her clothing on a nail while entering the interviewer’s office. More information would be needed to determine whether she did in f act possess the competency of appropriate personal presentation. (This is, of course, akin to Wernimont and Campbell’ s (1968) distinction between signs and samples referred to in Chapter 1). The causal part of the competenc y def inition is to distinguish between those man y characteristics which may be studied and measured about a person and those aspects which actually do provide a link to relevant behaviour. Thus having acquired a particular academic qualif ication may or may not be correlated with the capacity to perform a particular job . The qualif ication is scarcely likely – talisman-lik e – to cause the capacity for performance. However, a tendency to grasp complexity and to learn new facts and figures may well be part of the causal chain, and the competenc y would be e xpressed in these terms, not in terms of the possibly related qualification. A focus on effective or superior performance is one which we shall return to again in some detail under Structured Psychometric Interviews. A moment’ s consideration may sho w that in b uilding models of success one is far more concerned with what the successful actually do than with what the unsuccessful f ail to do. In seeking to understand competencies required for piano playing one w ould learn little by w atching and listening to an incompetent player striking the

42 Effective interviewing wrong notes! By contrast a period of study with an accomplished exponent of the instrument w ould be lik ely to e xpose the rele vant characteristics of behaviour far more. One may be forgiven for thinking that there is nothing very new in competencies and, rather lik e Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who discovered he had been speaking prose for more than 40 years, the disco very of competencies as an idea is not particularly earth-shattering. On the other hand by referring an y explicit or implicit model of beha viour to a def inition, albeit as simple as that given, one may begin to sort the wheat from the chaf f in deciding what range of beha viours and predispositions to beha viour are relevant. This can help a void the trap of focusing on totally irrelevant or prejudicial aspects or seeking a v ery broad and o vercomprehensive model as with the checklist approach mentioned earlier. Competency descriptions may be e xpressed in a v ariety of w ays. Sometimes they lead to very tight prescriptions which may apply very much to a particular job or class of jobs. Thus one comes across prescriptions such as ‘must be able to draft polic y documentation appropriate for consideration of directors of subsidiary companies’. In other cases they are more clearly rooted in beha viour. Two examples are given below. In the f irst a brief def inition is follo wed by quite a detailed exposition and both positive and negative behavioural indicators are given. In the second, briefer, example only the positive behaviours are shown.

PERSONAL Control of initiatives Making decisions and taking charge of events Executives strong in control of initiatives make a definite decision to proceed with an action or actions. They see themselves as owners of decisions and the actions required to stem from them. They may position a variety of others in representative or supportive roles, for instance using inputs from financial, ops or planning deputies, but they will be clear that it is they who are setting actions in train. They may see their work as a series of projects to be set in motion. They will take initiatives not only in

Structured interviewing in selection 43 terms of making things happen, but also in the sense of selfmanagement. They will be in control of their own time as a resource and will have distinct means of coping with the stresses of the job. They will be prepared to follow through tenaciously, not letting problems deter them and not succumbing to hostility. This competency is one that will be significant in the leadership style of the executive.

Positive indicators

Negative indicators

Can identify when a decision to proceed was taken

Vague about decision points

Takes charge of a range of activities – calling meetings, briefings, initiatives, planning

Lets activities ‘take their course’

In charge of their own time

Event-driven

Statements indicating ownership personally or with or through immediate group

Ownership for actions resting with outsiders, maybe vague ‘they’

Reproduced by kind permission of MSL HR Consulting Ltd

DIRECT INFLUENCING Definition The ability to convince others to buy something or to support a recommended course of action, and the ability to reach a compromise between two conflicting parties.

Behavioural indicators Ɂ Persuades others by pointing out benefits to them. Ɂ

Uses information or data effectively to persuade others or support a position.

44 Effective interviewing Ɂ

Offers several different arguments to persuade or support a position.

Ɂ

Explains complex ideas by using well-chosen examples from personal experience.

Ɂ

Prepares for presentations with documentation, facts and figures.

Ɂ

Anticipates and prepares for how people will react.

Ɂ

Identifies the most important concerns and issues to others.

Ɂ

Tailors own language to the level of audience.

Ɂ

Makes a special effort to relate to people and their own level of understanding.

Ɂ

Presents own position persuasively.

Reproduced by kind permission of MSL HR Consulting Ltd

In the UK the Management Charter Initiative (MCI) has had a considerable influence on the promulgation and currenc y of competencies (or competences in their preferred spelling). The y make a distinction between these and underpinning knowledge and understanding. They see performance standards, def ined as the acti vities and outcomes which constitute good performance, as depending on both knowledge and understanding and personal competencies.

CRITERION, COMPETENCY-BASED AND CRITICAL INCIDENT INTERVIEWS There is a class of intervie ws where e vidence is sought related to particular competencies or criteria. Criterion-based intervie ws actually have their origins in another field, that of assessment centre technology. It is from that field that the term criteria comes, a usage which pre-dates competenc y, though no practical distinction is made here between criterion-based and competenc y-based intervie wing. However, a brief excursion into assessment centres is made in the next

Structured interviewing in selection 45 section. They are discussed in more detail in Chapter 4. The idea of exploring critical incidents as a way of establishing areas of relevance was discussed earlier in this chapter . The critical incident frame work can also be used, in effect, as the script for an interview.

Assessment centre technology Assessment centre methods grew out of requirement by various fighting forces during World War II to select young officers. In the British Army these became kno wn as the W ar Offices Selection Boards (W OSBs) referred to briefly in Chapter 1. Comparable techniques were, though, used by the Office of Strategic Services in the United States, and by the German Army. Central to all w as the notion that rather than using historic methods of selection, based v ery much on a conventional interview exploration of a person’ s background, it made f ar more sense to carry out some sort of simulation of the tasks with which the y were involved. This led to the use of simple outdoor command situations in which young men would be given the task of leading a group of others in activities such as crossing a stream with ropes and pine poles carrying an oil drum with them. Such outdoor activities were boosted by internal tactical planning exercises that were paper -based. Commercial applications followed leading to a v ariety of methods such as the in-bask et, in which a person’s handling of correspondence is examined.

The need to interview One principle of the assessment centre approach is that of using a multiplicity of measures in order to enhance reliability and to e xplore a variety of situations. Some of those situations were more e xtended in time than others, and the competencies associated with them – such as the de velopment of staf f – which might be v ery signif icant in a variety of roles, were relatively difficult to access by immediate exercise activities. Therefore the approach w as used of asking intervie w questions specif ically related to these competencies or criteria and then applying some degree of rigour in interpretation. Typically the questions themselv es are only partially pre-determined, giving scope for indi vidual follow-up. The de gree of licence that this might imply is not necessarily extreme. To begin with, part of the proper use of assessment centre methods in volves the careful training of assessors. This training will typically include the practice of criterion-based interviewing and within this w ould be scope to e xplore and broadly

46 Effective interviewing agree interpretations. Also the assessment centre process in volves a wash-up discussion in which information from a number of assessors is shared and their initial evaluations challenged among the group. This again helps with standardisation; the assessor who has conducted a criterion-based intervie w on a candidate pro vides the evidence for his conclusions to his colleagues, and these conclusions are subject to revision in the light of the ensuing discussion. An illustrative sequence of questions is shown below.

COMPETENCY-BASED QUESTIONS – DIRECT INFLUENCING Ɂ

Tell me about a time when you resolved a disagreement between two people. (If necessary) What was the source of the disagreement? Did the problem arise again?

Ɂ

How do you get other people to do things? (If necessary) Can you give me an example? Was that something that they did not originally want to do? How do you know that?

Ɂ

Think of something fairly technical or complex in your work; how would you explain it to a lay person? Can you explain it to me now?

As will be evident by reference to the panel on the direct influencing competency, man y of the questions directly reflect the beha vioural indicators gi ven. Although deri ved from assessment centre technology, criterion-based interviews are frequently used outside the context of assessment centres as such, as stand alone methods.

The critical incident technique as an interviewing method The idea behind the critical incident approach is that the response to some incidents may be critical in determining the success or otherwise

Structured interviewing in selection 47 of a job. The publican shouting time to a rowdy group of revellers and how the consequent strongly e xpressed desire to remain in the pub drinking was handled would be one example. Another might be pushing through a capital e xpenditure budget in the f ace of opposition in order to make a department viable. The use of the critical incident technique to structure an intervie w is based on the idea of e xploring the candidate’s capacity to respond appropriately to the incident. There are v ariations on the style of the question used. In the so-called situational intervie w (Latham et al 1980) candidates are ask ed how they would behave in a gi ven situation. Responses are rated using beha vioural statements developed by experts in the job concerned (the subject matter e xperts or SMEs again) as benchmarks. Thus the immediate focus is on hypothetical behaviour. In the P atterned Beha vioural Description Intervie w – PBDI or sometimes just BDI (Janz 1982) – candidates are ask ed about specif ic critical incidents again, b ut no w in terms of actual experience. These two types are illustrated below.

CRITICAL INCIDENT INTERVIEWING A situational question You have been working on a product advertising campaign with a client for several weeks and have finally agreed the whole plan including all the copy. You have media space booked for three weeks ahead and have a photographer and studio lined up for product shots next week. Your client contact phones you and says that her boss’s boss has just seen the copy and is not happy about some of the messages. What would you do? A patterned behavioural description question Have you ever managed to get to the nub of a resource allocation problem when others seemed to be floundering or casting about? Tell me about an occasion when you experienced this.

The distinction between these tw o types of critical incident intervie w is superf icially that between the hypothetical and the actual. T aylor and O’Driscoll (1995) ha ve emphasised this distinction in their book on structured interviewing, but the distinction is not absolute. In many

48 Effective interviewing cases one w ould e xpect respondents to the situational intervie w to draw upon what the y had actually done. The tw o techniques can, in fact, be mer ged by the simple follo w-up of ‘ha ve you e ver e xperienced anything like that?’ to a situational question. Rather similarly either of these types of question might be used in competenc y-based interviewing. Indeed the f irst e xample in the panel sho wing direct influencing questions could be regarded as a PBDI question.

Limitations As with all intervie w methods there are some limitations in these approaches. Using the criterion-based intervie w technique in the context of assessment centre work requires a detailed understanding of that methodology. Using it outside an assessment centre may be to do so without the rigour implied by ha ving a facilitator chairing a discussion and without the interplay of comment from a group of others. With critical incident intervie ws an unskilled intervie wer may gi ve too man y clues as to the area of e xploration, may rephrase or paraphrase acceptable questions and in ef fect cue the intervie wee to the right answer. Of course this happens, as indicated above, with conventional interviews but there is an added danger that perv ersely because of the very specificity of the criterion-based approach it may be more open to cueing than otherwise, because the situation is clearly defined.

STRUCTURED PSYCHOMETRIC INTERVIEWS (SPI) Origins The origins of the SPI approach go back to the 1950s in the United States. The SPI is predicated upon the notion that those who are the most ef fective e xponents of a role – the most competent – actually talk about their work in ways that are different – perhaps qualitatively as well as quantitati vely – from those who are not. There are some conceptual links, of course, between this idea and the illustrati ve behaviours that can be brought out in the criterion-based or critical incident interviews. Some links can also be seen with those areas relating to the idea of expression in speech being a fairly direct reflection of personality as referred to in Chapter 1 (Wrenn, 1949). It is this latter notion which, of course, is arguably at the basis of all interview methods but it is also arguably only with the SPI that its exploration is systematised.

Structured interviewing in selection 49 The idea of speech as an indication of consistent patterns of behaviour is, of course, not by an y means ne w. As indicated in Chapter 1 the whole matter of Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is full of links between what we say and our underlying attitude and behavioural tendency. It is also note worthy that methods aimed at modifying beha viour, even on an enduring basis and so ar guably involving some modification of personality, concentrate on manipulating speech patterns. This is most graphically illustrated in Geor ge Orwell’s no vel Nineteen Eighty-Four. There two particularly powerful principles are applied in the controlled language ‘Newspeak’. One is the e xplicit use of labels opposite in meaning from what the y actually denote; the other is the contraction and so limitation in thought underlying the language. These concepts are both illustrated particularly in the abbreviations to ‘Minipax’ and ‘Miniluv e’ of the W ar Ministry and Secret Police respectively. Arguably, also, the use of repetitions in religious ceremony, the chanting of slogans by political or sporting groups, can all be seen as tending to comparable ends. It is against this relati vely complex background that the SPI should be seen.

Excellence modelling As indicated, a k ey to de veloping an SPI is the modelling of e xcellence among the current e xponents of a rele vant role. This does, of course, assume that who is e xcellent can be kno wn in adv ance b ut arguably in any form of modelling of ef fective performance the same requirement applies. It is lik ely to be some what easier, though not particularly easy, to discover in those fields where there are hard data. Thus in areas such as selling or other jobs in volving measurable performance, for example control of materials w astage, there will be some objective measures. These measures may be complicated by a variety of other f actors and usually it is as well to check the apparently hard data with more subjective information. For instance a salesperson working with a product group to wards the end of its natural cycle will be disadvantaged in relation to colleagues already in a position to sell the latest types or models. Once such excellent performing individuals have been identified it is usual to under go detailed discussions with them, typically in focusgroup mode. (The topic of focus groups is returned to in Chapter 7 in other connections.) The focus group is a semi-structured means of

50 Effective interviewing gathering views from a number of people all of whom can be expected to have something to contribute. Its use in relation to the SPI in volves exploring attitudes, beha viours, situations and circumstances relating to the role, and ho w problems are o vercome, what w ould be f actors making for success and what would be likely to lead to difficulty. The focus-group participants are ask ed to reflect on their o wn attitudes, behaviours and experiences and those of others, to characterise truly ef fective beha viour and contrast it with that e xhibited by the mediocre or wholly inef fective. Usually such discussions are taperecorded for detailed transcription. In analysing this material, in addition to the v arious pieces of information gathered on the circumstances, situations and behaviours of relevance, such as w ould apply to the critical incident and criterion-based techniques, one notes the particular use of w ords. Thus if a particular situation is spok en of with intensity or vi vidness, this may gi ve a clue to attitudes supporting success which can then be reflected in the interview itself. One-to-one meetings may supplement the focus group or groups b ut one does then lose the opportunity for the most ef fective practitioners themselves to thrash out dif ferences in vie ws expressed. Typical of an issue that might arise is consideration of whether the most successful salespeople in a particular field insist only on meeting the top person in an organisation, or is success related to having one’s foot inside any door! A number of questions are then deri ved from the information gathered. They are likely to be related to a tentati ve competency or dimension model. This question set and the model may be further fleshed out by additional one-to-one discussions, possibly with those in char ge of the target group. More information may be added, too, from the study of relevant documentation such as mission statements, policies or b usiness plans for e xtended periods of time ahead. From the questions generated on the basis of this material one w ould then trial a f irst version of the interview on another group of clearly expert exponents of the role, using their responses to further ref ine the questions and define the interpretative framework for them and the competenc y model. Sometimes this stage may be skipped as a specif ic step and collapsed with the follo wing one, in which tw o contrasted groups are studied. One group will, again, consist of e xcellent exponents of the role. The other will be made up of those who are seen as less effective. By applying the interpretative framework to the responses of these tw o different groups one may see if the instrument is o verall capable of discriminating between them and so be an effective tool in selection. As part of this

Structured interviewing in selection 51 process it is sometimes necessary and appropriate to discard quite a large number of question items. Once the interview has been developed in this way it is necessary to train those who are going to use it. The amount of effort required in training will depend not only on the capabilities of those trained, particularly their de gree of comfort in handling the comple xities of language that may be in volved, but also on the complexity and clarity of the coding frame used. There will be some cases where a fairly broad framework can apply to questions and others where the framework is narrower. For instance it is possible that a high-performing sales group will ha ve distinguished themselv es from their average colleagues by giving, say, three rather than just two examples of selling a new product in its first week on the market. This difference will need to ha ve been captured in the interpretati ve framework and then reinforced in the training. (‘T wo examples may sound good so why not gi ve the intervie wee the benef it of the doubt?’ Answer, ‘Because if you do then you will tend to be selecting more like your mediocre, rather than more lik e your best. ’) Sometimes the questions show up relatively unusual responses which are characteristic of some of the expert group but not of all of them, so it is necessary to ensure that these are also captured in the interpretative framework.

Types of question and interpretation The range of questions used in an SPI may be quite broad, corresponding to the PBDI and situational questions discussed earlier, as well as exploring attitudes and feelings or intentions: ‘Ho w would you feel if …?’, ‘How would you endeavour to go about …?’ Some questions will explore simple matters of f act, while others will pose hypothetical situations. Some ask very open-ended questions – ‘Tell me about …’ – while others are closed – ‘W ould you prefer X or Y?’ The touchstone in deciding whether to include a question in the final format is always whether or not it produces different responses between the higher and lo wer performing groups that it is intended to distinguish. In all cases an important tenet of the approach is that interpretation of the question is not gi ven to the respondent. Although this may be thought of as an aspect generally applying to intervie wing, for otherwise the intervie wer might well be at least halfw ay to supplying the answer, it is particularly important in the SPI. Here the respondent is required to operate from their own frame of reference and it is recognised that this is lik ely to gi ve the strongest clue to their typical or

52 Effective interviewing consistent behaviour. Adding to that frame of reference, for instance by illustrating an unfamiliar word, will tend to change the picture. For example the term ‘equity’ can refer to f airness and justice or to the shares of a limited compan y. The question, ‘Tell me about the equity in your present compan y’ might produce a response in terms of, say , equal opportunities consciousness or f inancial ownership. To elaborate the question by specifying which use is meant is to supply the frame of reference for the candiate – virtually to gi ve the answer – rather than to tap into the intervie wee’s natural frame of reference, which forms the basis of each person’s natural behaviour. Elaboration is tempting when the intervie wee seeks clarif ication, but this at least distorts, if it does not wholly destroy, the value of the SPI approach.

Use and delivery of the SPI As with a v ariety of other adv anced techniques, such as personality questionnaires, there is little doubt that the SPI method is likely to fare best in the hands of specialists, either external consultants or a more or less dedicated group within an or ganisation. The former are often likely to be more comfortable in fulf illing a requirement to prepare narrative reports on candidates. Such reports can, in fact, be as detailed as those written on the basis of a standardised psychometric battery (see Appendix I). The y may be particularly useful when the SPI is applied in development rather than selection, giving as they can scope to suggest development options that are likely to be effective. Given the de gree of standardisation inherent in the SPI it is not necessary for interviewer and interpreter to be one and the same. Just as two or three paper -and-pencil psychometric instruments might be administered by one person and interpreted by another , the same can apply to the SPI. This will often involve the use of a tape-recorder and the services of a transcriber, so that the person making the interpretation will work from a printed text of the interview. This also provides scope for further checks on standardisation in interpretation. The standardisation of the process also means that a part of it can be clearly separated out and used as a shorter screening de vice, with the remainder of the questions being delivered only to those who pass this first stage. In this w ay time and mone y can be sa ved while still preserving the objecti vity deri ved from the use of a common and highly specif ied process. Also questions in the SPI are frequently arranged so that competencies are addressed successively question by

Structured interviewing in selection 53 question. Thus if eight competencies are to be co vered, the f irst of which is direct influence, questions 1, 9, 17, 25, 33 and 41 of a 48question interview would seek to tap into this competency. This obviates the problem of cueing referred to abo ve in connection with other forms of competency-based interviews. The Structured Psychometric Intervie w is often deli vered by telephone, an approach which appears to w ork well. It has the adv antage of saving a large amount of time and money. It can sometimes appear unfamiliar as a method to candidates and appropriate brief ing is necessary. This w ould often be done initially when an appointment for a telephone interview was booked, when expectations, for instance as to the time that might be required, w ould be set. The use of a standard introduction at the time of the intervie w is also important. This should co ver, among other things, the important point discussed above that no interpretation of questions will be of fered. It will also include gaining permission to make a tape-recording of the interview.

Reservations and caution about SPI The training to w ork effectively with the method can be quite daunting and without it the technique rapidly defaults to a loose semi-structured interview. Training focuses on the deli very of questions as illustrated abo ve, and also upon their interpretation. It is the latter which after initial difficulties with delivery are likely to pose the most problems. It is sometimes difficult to refer back to the original source of the interpretative framework and it is not uncommon to find manuals of SPI interpretation littered with year after year of amendments without any necessary basis in fact. Caution by the uninitiated about the use of the SPI is typically based on the notion of what in Chapter 2 I have called a strong assumption as to what an interview should be. Telephone delivery has sometimes also been a cause of concern. The telephone is a piece of technology that has been with us for well o ver a hundred years and it is perhaps surprising that there should be an y resistance to its use. In f act resistance is more often put forw ard by those with armchair e xperience of the method rather than those with direct familiarity with it. It does, though, indicate a further clear requirement for training if the intervie w is to be deli vered in an efficient and confident way to the candidate. Armchair critics are also much inclined to view any form of highly structured interview as overly mechanistic. For example Harris (1989)

54 Effective interviewing reviewed the so-called comprehensi ve structured intervie w (CSI) which comprised a mix of questions co vering situational and job knowledge, job simulation and w orker requirements. He concluded that this might be vie wed as an ‘oral v ersion of a written test’. T o retort, ‘and why not add the rigour of testing to the comfortable medium of the spoken word?’, might seem to line up too firmly on the objectivist-psychometric side of the debate between that philosophy and the subjectivist-psychometric one (see Chapter 2). The SPI is such a broad technique that it is sometimes seen as universal in its application. No real limitations have yet been found as to the types of role that can be explored. My experience in the last five years alone has co vered salesreps in a ne w insurance compan y, hybrids linking IT and b usiness, middle and senior managers in the NHS, and North Sea oil-rig engineering supervisors. But of course the SPI does not directly assess current le vel of skill in a particular f ield any more than do other interviews or, say, personality questionnaires. It is also sometimes assumed that it is just another intervie w and there is therefore a temptation to see it as only applicable at an early and crude stage of the selection process, whereas in f act it can yield data comparable to, say, a battery of psychometric methods. Again it has sometimes suf fered by being put together with f ar less ef fective methods such as ill-thought-out presentations or poorly conducted conventional interviews. Last b ut not least is the question of costs. Although when established the method is likely to be as cheap as other one-to-one methods and f ar less e xpensive than, say , full assessment centres, thorough bespoke research is required for it to realise its full potential. The training required if it is to be done properly is lik ely to be on a par with that needed for the interpretation of psychometrics. (But if training seems e xpensive, what price ignorance?) One may also need to consider the cost of ha ving tapes typed up. All that ha ving been said, both published studies such as that of W iesner and Cronshaw (1988), Wright et al (1989) or Robertson and Smith (1988) and, from my own professional e xperience bespok e research, typically sho w structured interviews in general to have substantial validity.

Convergence on structure There are perhaps a number of forces, some operating in specif ic fields and some more generally, that suggest structured approaches are here to

Structured interviewing in selection 55 stay. Although the y may not wholly supplant con ventional interviews across the board, the y may, as suggested in Chapter 2 supplement the conventional approach or actually replace it in certain instances. First there is an increasing recognition of the v ery e xistence of structured interviews. As a consultant I ha ve found clients increasingly a ware of and familiar with such approaches. Thus discussions once characterised by questions such as ‘structured intervie ws: what are the y?’ are no w typified by ‘structured intervie ws: what sort do you use?’ Search and selection firms who would once have wholly anathematised a structured approach have more recently sought to include it as part of their unique selling proposition. The subsequent stage is its recognition as something routinely expected by clients and of commodity status. Next is an increasing a wareness, albeit varying in its specif icity and intensity, of the ills attendant upon prejudice plus its pervasive nature as encapsulated in relation to one particular type in the term ‘institutionalised racism’. This has prompted mo ves towards enhancing manifest objectivity in man y aspects of emplo yment. It has been a point of emphasis in recent literature on intervie wing (eg Awosunle and Doyle, 2001; Anderson, 1997; Wood, 1997a, b; Ramsey et al, 1997). Last b ut not least is the mo ve to call centre operations. These currently employ some 400,000 people in the United Kingdom, with a substantial sub-set working in the recruitment f ield. Working over the telephone to assess potential recruits for clients, these people tend to follow prescribed patterns of questioning for each of their recruitment campaigns. Thus at any one time a dozen or more interviewers may be responding to incoming calls and screening to a common-structured interview pattern. The screening may be on the basis of a number of ‘status’ variables, reflected in questions such as, ‘Do you hold a clean UK driving licence?’ Alternatively they may deal directly with competencies such as interpersonal sensiti vity, or planning and or ganising. Sometimes this screening process is followed by more extensive questioning, also conducted by telephone b ut this time on an ‘outbound call’ basis. The initial screening intervie wer will often ha ve set the appointments for the follo w-up intervie w for those successfully screened. The degree of system necessary in conducting high v olume recruitment in this way lends itself very readily to structured interview approaches. There is, in f act, nothing ne w about the use of screening interviews in high v olume situations. Miles et al (1946) describe a study in which US Marine Corps recruits were effectively screened for ‘neuropsychiatric disability’ at a rate of three per minute [sic].

56 Effective interviewing

SUMMARY 1. Structured interviews vary in form, from simple planning aids to precise prescriptions of questions and admissible responses. 2. A number of forms of structured interview are aimed at gathering clear evidence of behaviour. 3. A variety of methods are available for deriving the dimensions for a structured interview. One of these is the repertory grid in which expert judges reveal the dimensions relevant to their judgements through a simple card-sorting task. Another is the critical incident technique in which subject matter experts (SMEs) are questioned about significant processes. A variety of other job analysis techniques also lead to the specification of relevant behaviour. 4. Competencies are used as the basis for many interviews. A competency is defined as: an underlying characteristic of a person which is causally related to effective or superior performance in a job or role. 5. Criterion-based interviewing is derived from assessment centre technology and involves the systematic exploration of evidence in relation to practically discrete areas of behaviour. Competencybased interviewing is used interchangeably as a term with criterion-based interviewing. 6. Critical incident technique has given rise to the situational interview, in which candidates indicate their responses to hypothetical situations and to the Patterned Behaviour Description Interview (PBDI) in which they are asked about their actual experiences. 7. The Structured Psychometric Interview (SPI) involves the development of questions, the responses to which distinguish between superior and ineffective exponents of a role. The dependence of the technique on precise patterns of language implies that both questions and interpretative frameworks for responses are tightly specified, with implications for training. 8. Research generally shows the predictive superiority of structured over unstructured interviews. 9. Currently a number of forces can be identified that support the increased use of structured interviews.

4 The extended interview DEGREES OF STRUCTURE One aspect of selection processes is the idea of taking people through an extended procedure. Such procedures seem often to be based on the idea of making an exacting scrutiny of the candidate and/or the notion of giving a number of interested parties the opportunity for in volvement in that scrutiny. Regardless of the degree to which the procedures used are actually made up of interviews as such, a number of organisations refer to them as the e xtended interview. The term second interview is sometimes used similarly: while a second intervie w is sometimes simply an intervie w under gone by those who survi ved a first interview, and its methods are not def ined, in some or ganisations second interview denotes a different and generally extended process. As well as assessment centres, as outlined in Chapter 3 and discussed further below, the processes considered here include somewhat less structured but still quite extensive methods. There are sometimes whole days in which groups of intervie wers are gathered together to tak e candidates through a series of separate intervie ws each to co ver at least broadly pre-determined areas. Thus candidates for an engineering post might experience a technical interview from a specialist, a personnel intervie w from a human resources manager , and then an o verall interview from a senior manager . Ho w f ar the content of such processes is prescribed in adv ance will v ary, b ut it would be unusual for this to e xtend to the detailed le vel of specification set out in the more adv anced forms of structured intervie w as described in Chapter 3. Ho wever, because there is some structuring and very often some de gree of f inal discussion about what has gone on, these processes are lik ely to be some what more rigorous than those usually used in conventional selection interviewing.

58 Effective interviewing Relatively little research has been carried out on this class of interview outside the area of assessment centres, which is described in more detail belo w and which has been subject to prolonged and detailed scrutiny. I ha ve sat in on some of the discussions follo wing these processes, and often the vie w of one of the intervie wing team prevails, and evidence is adduced which was not covered in any form of initial job specification. Again, though, at least this evidence is out in the open when there is such a discussion. Quite often, additional information such as that pro vided from psychometric instruments will be considered in discussion together with the intervie w information. Ev en so the procedures together are unlikely to represent the le vels of rigour and accurac y attained either by structured interviewing or by assessment centres. Having a number of interviewers involved, having them explore more or less prescribed areas and ha ving at least semi-formalised discussion of all the information gathered may help reduce the level of subjectivity somewhat.

THE BOARD OR PANEL INTERVIEW In the board intervie w intervie wing is carried out by a group of people, typically acting under the chairmanship of one of their number1. As with other forms of e xtended intervie w process there may be a division of labour, with different people exploring different aspects of the candidate’ s suitability. This type of intervie w should be distinguished from a tw o-person interview, where tw o interviewers each take on the role of questioner or note-tak er. In fact in many panel interviews there may be some degree of control in terms of the chairman allocating time to dif ferent interviewers and inviting them in turn to put forw ard their questions. Ho wever, there is typically little or no control o ver note-taking and there may be little control over the deliberati ve processes or discussion used to formulate the evaluation of the candidates. Usually when a board intervie w has been decided upon there is a strong representational element in those making it up. Thus such 1

The term board is sometimes used in the sense referred to here, b ut also in the sense of a body responsible for a recruitment and selection process as a whole, as in the Ci vil Service Selection Board (CSSB). This has sometimes led to confusion, even among researchers, not helped, of course, by the f act that board or panel interviews are among the methods used by such bodies!

The extended interview 59 processes are frequently used in local go vernment situations where the panel may comprise a mixture of v oluntary elected members and salaried officers and where there is a requirement for concerned stakeholders to have a say in the interview process. In certain medical appointments, a v ariety of parties is common; doctors, managers, nurses all have their say in the appointment process by sitting on a board or panel. Sometimes these panels are preceded or followed by a so-called informal meeting, not uncommonly dubbed ‘trial by sherry’. In e very situation the de gree of control v aries. It cannot be assumed that those intervie wing will have had any relevant training and they may only gather together as a body for the purposes of making a particular appointment, with the ne xt appointment to be made requiring in its turn a dif ferent group of representati ves. Panel members may also turn up or not in a relati vely arbitrary way, so that the panel chairperson may not know in advance who will be present. Despite a certain haphazardness on occasions, in some measure such processes can be seen to be f air. They may have the important advantage of gauging whether the candidate in potentially politically sensitive roles can be seen as sufficiently ‘one of us’ to be able to be acceptable to the stak eholders present and those whom the y may represent. This carries with it the notion that changing the status quo may be hard with such methods, almost re gardless of what may be in a job description or competenc y model. It may , by the same tok en, promote or preserv e the e xercise of prejudice. Notwithstanding these dif ficulties Wiesner and Cronsha w’s (1988) study showed higher le vels of v alidity even for unstructured board than unstructured individual interviews. Structured board interviews produced v alidities only slightly lo wer on a verage than structured individual interviews.

ASSESSMENT CENTRES Sometimes what is meant by an extended interview is what would otherwise be described as an assessment centre. The degree of interviewing as such in a centre will vary. It is not too much of a stretch of the imagination to regard the whole process as equivalent to an interview, in that the candidate does have various ‘questions’ put to him or her, albeit through a variety of exercises. Assessment centres use simulations of work-like situations in order to produce e vidence of a candidate’ s suitability for roles related to

60 Effective interviewing those situations. Assessors are typically trained in some detail in the processes with which they are working and, as indicated in Chapter 3, this is something which will often distinguish the whole use of assessment centre methods from the more con ventional interviewing practices. In fact, in best-ordered assessment centres assessors are trained to make distinctions amongst observing behaviour, recording it (typically by making detailed verbatim notes if the e xercise involves speech), classifying behaviour according to competencies rele vant to the role, and f inally e valuating it in terms of the strength of the competency indicated (see Figure 4.1). This f inal evaluation process itself is often tw o-stage. An initial vie w is tak en by an assessor who has observed a particular exercise but there is considerable discussion and ratification or otherwise of the evaluation level given at the assessor ‘w ashup’ meeting. (Indeed the w ashup session might e ven be regarded as comprising a series of mini-intervie ws of assessors by their colleagues as the y are ask ed to support their conclusions.) The British Psychological Society (BPS) currently has a w orking group

The extended interview 61 producing a series of guidelines and standards for best practice in assessment centre usage. This initiati ve follows, though at considerable distance in time, a similar one in the United States. A number of different assessment centre exercise types are described below.

The group discussion In group discussions candidates are gi ven a single problem or a series of problems to address. Groups vary in size from between four to seven people and the time allo wed for discussion will v ary typically between 30 minutes and an hour . Group discussions may be assigned role or non-assigned role. In assigned-role group discussions each candidate is gi ven a particular part to play , such as advocacy of one particular site for the location of a ne w f actory. In non-assigned role discussions the group is advised that it is a management team required to consider together some issues of interest to the company as a whole and to come up with recommendations to pass to senior management. Issues discussed may be broad, such as communication strate gies or the introduction of total quality management, or they may have a rather more specific agenda of management problems, such as handling the temporary closure of the staff car park.

Analysis exercises In these exercises the format is usually that of a business case study in which a v ariety of documents are e xamined, conclusions are dra wn and recommendations made. Candidates will usually work on such an exercise on their o wn. The y may simply submit a written paper or their deliberations may lead to a presentation to a group of assessors.

In-baskets With in-bask ets (or in-trays or in-box es), the candidate has to cope with a range of correspondence that has accumulated in a predecessor’s office. Some of the items may require immediate action. There may be clashes of priorities. There may also be some hidden issues that will only sho w up as links among items are e xplored; assessments are based not only on the immediate replies to correspondence items but also on the pattern of future meetings and other acti vities planned.

62 Effective interviewing

Role-plays A variety of dif ferent role-play situations are used in assessment centres. Some of these can be seen as coming close to other types of interview in that an interview format is used. Quite often, the candidate is required to conduct some form of interview with a role-player, typically with an assessor acting as a neutral observer. Common situations used are a sales call, a disciplinary discussion with a subordinate, or an information gathering interview with a third party. Where the role-play approximates closer to other forms of interview is where the meeting is with a supposed senior person in the organisation (see box below).

SOME ROLE-PLAY SITUATIONS You are a representative for the Greenspace Care Company, a service organisation which supplies and maintains potted plants in offices. You are to meet Jean Morris, office manager for the head office of the South Blankshire Building Society. You have not met Jean before but you understand that she is interested in regular maintenance of plants and the provision of cut flowers for main reception areas, a service that you would have to subcontract. You are Pat Dawson, factory manager of the East Walton plant of the ACME Fastener Company. You are due to see Lou Smithers, a supervisor who has been the subject of some complaints from other staff members. You have a number of documents relating to the situation, which you must read before meeting Lou in 30 minutes time. You are Jo(e) Diestrait, a partner in the accountancy firm of Trimble and Trimble. A decision has been taken in principle to merge with another firm, Wily and Dodge. You are to meet Les Marks, one of their partners, to find out more about their internal administrative procedures. You have just taken over as Assistant Personnel Director (Recruitment) in a large catering company. You have been asked to meet Astrid Starr, non-executive director, who has recently written to the Chairman about the company’s record on the employment of disabled people.

The extended interview 63 In all cases it is the neutral assessor who actually mak es the e valuation of beha viour. Ho wever, part of the information on which this evaluation is based may come from a mini-intervie w with the roleplayer. This is conducted by the assessor after the candidate has left the room, and co vers the aspects of the candidate’ s behaviour which had a ne gative or a positi ve impact on the role-player , and a discussion about who appeared to be in charge of the meeting.

Interviews within the assessment centre Interviews as such and as normally understood do actually tak e place in assessment centres in a v ariety of ways. To begin with there is the in-basket interview, frequently b ut not invariably used to add further information to that gi ven in the written w ork. This intervie w is conducted after a preliminary e xamination of the w ork that has been done by the candidate. This e xamination may take anything up to an hour. The assessor prepares and then asks a range of questions designed to follo w up further on the w ork done. F or e xample, if a number of items ha ve been discarded the intervie w may shed further light on whether this w as deliberate, accidental or a result of lack of time. The in-bask et interview can also be used to e xplore specif ic competencies, just as a criterion-based intervie w does. F or example seeking the candidate’s views of the various characters depicted in the in-basket may give clues to their interpersonal judgement. Candidates will sometimes also of fer further information about their typical approach to handling issues akin to those depicted in the in-basket. The criterion-based structured intervie w discussed in Chapter 3 is, of course, something else which can be included in the assessment centre process. One of the principles in assessment centre design is to have multiple coverage of the competencies and sometimes these may be relatively under-represented in the other exercises. As indicated in Chapter 3 the criterion-based intervie w may then be used to e xtend the coverage of competencies. This is illustrated in Figure 4.2. (Note that the coverage of competencies by exercises will vary according to the detailed content as well by type of exercise. Thus Figure 4.2 is not intended to be definitive.) Usually in assessment centres a further source of information is available to assessors – the participant report. One of these will usually be completed in relation to each exercise undertaken and they serve to supplement the assessor’s observations.

64 Effective interviewing

FEEDBACK AND FOLLOW-UP INTERVIEWING When candidates have gone through various forms of extended procedures there is scope to gi ve them feedback on their performance to date. As indicated in Chapter 1 this is quite commonly done in conjunction with psychometric procedures and, indeed, with regard to psychometric instruments it is a principle enshrined in the recommendations of the Institute of Personnel and De velopment on psychometric use. Gi ving feedback can also pro vide an opportunity to gather further information, which may in itself be used to ref ine the initial interpretation of the candidate’ s psychometric results. Thus the feedback then incorporates an interview process within it. One commonly asked question during follo w-up discussions is whether the results

The extended interview 65 just fed back were in line with e xpectations and common experience. Where there are discrepancies these may be a matter for further exploration or comment. The box below shows an example of a feedback interview following the administration of a standard psychometric procedure and the relevant passage from a subsequent write-up. Interviewer: There are several indications from your 16PF results that you are quite independent-minded. Candidate: Yes, I’d go along with that. Interviewer: You will probably ha ve some pretty clear vie ws yourself in advance on an issue or problem and you may actually come to conclusions quite quickly. Candidate: Yes. Interviewer: Can you think of a time when you have done that? Candidate: Yes. We had a major re-f inancing job to do last year on a line of credit required for e xpansion. I felt we should w ork with XYZ Bank and I approached them and just one other source, as a sort of benchmark, and then I dro ve through the choice of XYZ. Interviewer: Like many people who are independent and quick in their summing up, you may not al ways see the need to tak e others along with you. You do not seem to feel a strong need for the support of a group. Candidate: I’m not so sure about that. I think you ha ve to carry the team along, and I al ways mak e a point of consulting with other people. The candidate shows evidence of elevated independence and also a high level of enthusiasm. She appears quite dominant and will probably seek to impose her position upon others. During feedback she recognised aspects of this style, b ut felt she adopted a more consultative approach than indicated here. It may be w orth exploring further the w ay in which she has w orked with her current subordinates and peers, in terms of team-building. Reports of feedback intervie ws can be used to indicate yet further issues for interviewers to explore later on. However, there is a note of caution to be sounded here. While helping the ne xt stage interviewer they may also cue the intervie wee in advance. It is necessary, if such

66 Effective interviewing approaches are not just to produce contrary evidence at the later stage (ie the intervie wee den ying or e xplaining a way the dif ficult beha vioural area opened up), for the interviewer to have training in probing in sufficient depth. In the e xample given above the follo w-up interviewer w ould need to elicit e vidence vis-à-vis the candidate’s team behaviour, not just seek affirmation or denial of support to the team. Another approach is to reserve feedback until after all processes are complete. This ob viates the dif ficulty just outlined of cueing the candidate, b ut it does also mean that the maximum v alue may not have been e xtracted from the intervie wing process. One potential solution to this is to gi ve very strong guidance to intervie wers as to specific questions to ask. Such an approach has been developed by the test publishers ASE in relation to follo w-up interviewing after applications of the 16 Personality F actor Questionnaire (16PF), a commonly used self-report personality in ventory. Questions are provided for a range of dif ferent combinations of scores on the v arious 16PF scales.

WORK SAMPLING INTERVIEWS AND AUDITIONS Another form of e xtended process in volves the direct sampling of behaviour required in w ork. The de gree to which this can be seen as falling into an intervie w format as such will v ary. Work sampling methods in general require people to reproduce aspects of the w ork and these may be supplemented by questions. In the theatrical audition the candidate may present a set piece, may be required to read lines from a ne w script and/or be ask ed questions about their o wn work. Often v ery large numbers of people – perhaps hundreds for a handful of parts – are seen initially and a smaller number called back. In such cases the f irst session may equate to what, for other jobs, would often be a paper-sifting process. The first of such auditions will necessarily usually be short. When theatrical auditions are held for entry to drama school a fee is usually char ged to the candidate, an aspect of the intervie w process not routinely reproduced else where! This may ha ve the adv antage of deterring the fri volous or casual application. It must also defray some of the costs of what is necessarily a labour-intensive process. Comparable methods are used in other aspects of leisure and entertaining. F or instance in the selection of croupiers a second-stage

The extended interview 67 process may follow a short initial interview. In the second stage candidates w ork at a gaming table alongside fully trained staf f and are observed by management and others.

CONCLUSION There are man y strands in the so-called e xtended interview process. One common thread is a de gree of structure. This may at the v ery least be implied even if there are multiple interviewers, in that each is to some degree given an area to pursue. (However, I know of one situation where 16 people intervie wed one particular candidate o ver a course of tw o days, and without an y structure whatsoe ver being imposed on any of them!) The scope for pursuit of different areas and the balance of dif ferent viewpoints in interpretation may be a reason for the apparent superiority of the unstructured board o ver the unstructured indi vidual intervie w. Thus the board intervie w can scarcely a void some structure. Certainly without structure there is little guarantee that extended time will be used at all profitably.

SUMMARY 1. Extended or second interview procedures may include a number of activities not necessarily in interview format as such. Assessment centres are sometimes referred to in this way. 2. Board or panel interviews, where a candidate is interviewed by a number of people, may involve a significant element of representation among board members. Research suggests higher validity for these interviews than for unstructured individual interviews. 3. In assessment centres a range of exercises are used and assessors are trained to base their evaluations on behavioural evidence shown in these exercises. Criterion-based interviews may be used in assessment centres, and role-plays may be cast in the form of an interview. Interviews may be used to add to information provided by an in-basket exercise. 4.

Giving feedback on a procedure such as a psychometric test may provide an opportunity for a follow-up interview on that procedure.

5. For some jobs candidates are required to reproduce the relevant behaviour directly, as in a theatrical audition.

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5 The use of interviews in managing and enhancing performance INTRODUCTION The interviews considered in this chapter dif fer in several ways from those that ha ve been the focus so f ar. First, the y are related to the performance of existing staff as opposed to the selection of new staff. They can involve day-to-day aspects as exemplified in the disciplinary interview. The y may also reflect a more forw ard-looking stance as shown in intervie ws related to the future de velopment of staf f. Sometimes these intervie ws form part of a de veloped and inte grated system of management. Sometimes, though, the y stand apart from other management processes with little or no inte gration. This may well limit their ef fectiveness. Thus there may be dif ferent terminologies with their o wn language for describing performance and beha viour, between appraisal and development. These might continue to be used separately or attempts made to translate from one to the other . Either approach could be confusing and dysfunctional. In a more integrated approach, language and standards would be common. A second dif ference between intervie ws discussed in this chapter and those considered earlier is to do with the intended flo w of information. As we ha ve seen in selection the main emphasis is typically upon gaining information from the intervie wee by use of the interview process. Interviewees clearly draw upon their personal history in making their responses. In the intervie ws considered here the interviewer gathers and reflects upon information a vailable in advance of

70 Effective interviewing the interview and then presents this to the intervie wee, albeit for discussion and possible elaboration or amendment (see Figure 5.1). (One variant upon this concept is when the person being intervie wed provides their own evaluation of their performance which may then be compared with ratings and other information produced by or available to the interviewer.) The third difference about the intervie ws reviewed here, and those examined in earlier chapters, is that the y can be seen as aspects of performance management. This has been characterised by Armstrong (1995) as in volving ‘the joint and continuing re view of performance against (agreed) objectives, requirements and plans and the agreement and implementation of improvement and further development plans.’ Interviews, of different sorts and at dif ferent stages, are an inte gral part of any system of performance management, b ut they are not the whole of it. The formulation and communication of the overall vision and direction of the or ganisation is another critical, underpinning, part. So too is the actual pro vision of the de velopment opportunities identified. Closer to the interview itself, and fitting in with the notion raised in Chapter 1 of the intervie w as merely a specialised form of communication, is the idea of ongoing performance support through discussions and feedback.

APPRAISALS Who conducts? These interviews are usually conducted directly by the manager of the person concerned. In other cases the y are conducted by a manager two le vels up, though quite often in such cases the immediate manager is involved in some form of follow-up discussion. A recent surv ey (SHL, 1995) found appraisal by peers being used in 7 per cent of respondent companies b ut suggested a substantial interest in extending the range of appraisers. It is common for all such interview processes to be subject themselv es to further sign-of f by another authority. The most common e xample is when an appraisal conducted by a manager is endorsed and/or annotated by that person’s own manager (the ‘grandparent’). Sometimes the sign-of f process may use a body such as a career management re view panel. In such cases information about the person being reported upon may be presented by the appraising manager , who in effect is interviewed by

The use of interviews in managing and enhancing performance 71

72 Effective interviewing the panel on the appraisee’ s behalf (a situation comparable to that extent to the questioning of an assessor in the assessment centre washup discussion, as referred to in Chapter 4.)

Appraisals and pay Appraisals have commonly been used with the purpose of re viewing performance over the previous period and setting some standards and objectives for the future. T ypically the pre vious period is a year and very often the appraisals are, accordingly , conducted around the period of the year end. One of the complications to which this gives rise is that the process inevitably gets bound up with the question of determining pay rises. Much has been said and written on this subject. There is a school of thought (e g Maier, 1958) that says that pay discussions should be entirely separate from appraisal as the former can sometimes tak e the shape of a negotiating exercise, whereas the latter is intended to be an objective review of what has gone before. In some organisations there is an effective separation of the two, perhaps by a time period as long as a quarter of a year . In other or ganisations the nettle is f irmly grasped and the tw o are link ed together. The SHL surv ey referred to above revealed that of the one hundred or ganisations studied 32 per cent reported ‘determining salary increase’ as one of the objectives of their appraisal scheme; 27 per cent reported no linkage between appraisals and pay. The complications of the linkage, whate ver attempts to separate them, are, of course compounded when ratings of performance are required to be f itted into a gi ven distribution with a direct knock-on effect to pay or even the determination of who should be made redundant. Managers are sometimes required to do this, clearly distorting attempts at objecti vity of the process, especially for those managing relatively small groups of people as most managers still do! (While preparing this book I learnt of a well-kno wn organisation who introduced a ne w appraisal scale while in the middle of a major do wnsizing operation. Managers were required to use three cate gories: ‘superior’, ‘satisf actory’ and ‘should be let go’. One-third of staf f were required to be placed in each category. Requests for clarification of the criteria to be used were met with disappro val rather than attempts at enlightenment!)

The use of interviews in managing and enhancing performance 73

Appraisals and behaviour Even in those cases where the link to pay or other decisions is not made directly, there is often a problem of over-generous ratings. This can have a variety of effects. In some cases it results in dif ficulties if there is a need to discipline or e ven fire staff. It is quite common, for instance, for someone who is suddenly declared as producing an unsatisfactory performance to ha ve had appraisal ratings, perhaps going back over years, which suggest just the opposite. This tendency to avoid difficult situations in the appraisal interview itself by making inflated ratings can also mean that a number of labels such as ‘ef fective’, ‘satisf actory’, ‘to standard’ and ‘a verage’ are seen as derogatory. This is of course by no means literally the case. These dif ficulties seem to persist e ven when specif ic beha viours mentioned in appraisals are clearly indicated in what is kno wn as behavioural anchorings. These are meant to sho w precisely the types of beha viour that w ould support a rating at the ends of the scale and/or at certain intermediate points. Beha viourally anchored scales do not seem particularly easy to produce, as scales purporting to be designed in this w ay often fail when tested against the touchstone of adequately indicating beha viour. Thus descriptions such as ‘sho ws excellent knowledge’ have a tendency to creep in. The source of this difficulty may be attributed to a limited understanding of what is meant by behaviour. A useful definition is ‘What a person actually says or does or does not say or do when required to do so. ’ The emphasis is clearly upon what is observ able, what has actually happened. The use of this idea in appraisal interviewing is akin to that in criterion-based interviewing, in particular in selection (see Chapter 3). Another process which sometimes happens in appraisal situations is that the of ficial scales become littered with the grace notes of pluses, minuses and other shadings. This again detracts from the behavioural anchoring and the clarity that that is intended to introduce, and is also likely to mean that, in effect, no two managers actually rate in the same w ay. Thus any of these limitations in the design or application of what is meant to be a systematic process can adversely affect the appraisal interview.

Appraisal training The w ay round some of these dif ficulties is, as with so man y other things, partly through effective training. A process such as behavioural

74 Effective interviewing anchoring is unlikely to be ef fectively understood and tak en on board through simply distrib uting documentation, although this is often the approach taken. The basis of any training will be to instil in the minds of those conducting the appraisal that the y need to go through a stepped process. As with other processes inherently based on beha viour, it is beha vioural evidence that is lik ely to stand up best in the appraisal interview and this should be to hand. An appraisal training programme is set out below, followed by a model approach to conducting an appraisal, such as can be found in the documentation used by many personnel departments. There is considerable emphasis upon gaining buy-in to the points being made, and to the process being one of joint discussion.

APPRAISAL TRAINING A typical programme Ɂ

Input

– introduction to appraisal – purpose of appraisal – use of appraisals in context of performance management – personal performance impact on business results

Ɂ

Exercise – what is behaviour? – what are competencies? – review behavioural descriptions and competency definitions

Ɂ

Input and exercise on setting behavioural targets.

Ɂ

Input on behaviourally anchored rating scales.

Ɂ

Exercises – appraisal practice – role-plays, observation and videos.

Ɂ

Exercise – appraisal write-up practice.

The use of interviews in managing and enhancing performance 75

A ‘model’ appraisal process Beginning of year – objectives set and clarified in discussions between appraiser and appraisee. Ongoing through year: – gathering of performance data – routine feedback on performance One month before appraisal meeting – date set.

Appraisal interview – Review of work including successes and areas for improvement. – Consideration of special circumstances or constraints placing limitations on performance. – Review of job description/responsibilities as appropriate. – Discussion of professional or managerial development needs. – Identification of targets for development. – Setting of objectives.

Appraisal write up – Within two weeks of meeting. – Space for comment by appraisee. – Review by appraiser’s boss (grandparent). Increasingly, appraisal systems are link ed to competencies so that these pro vide the model used to describe beha viour. It is also, perhaps, commonplace that appraisals themselv es are something of a Cinderella activity in many organisations. The existence of an overall performance management frame work of which competencies form a part may reinforce better use of appraisals and as indicated are lik ely to be an integral part of training.

76 Effective interviewing Apart from the problems already discussed, it is not unusual for appraisals to be conducted late or not at all. The SHL appraisal survey (1995) indicated that many appraisers – 44 per cent – receive no training even though only 6 per cent of or ganisations reported pro viding no training. McGregor (1957) realised the limitations in the practice of appraisal when he ur ged a mo ve from what he sa w as a focus on determination of weaknesses to a concentration on performance and on the beha viour necessary to promote ef fective performance. This coaching stance can be seen as a k ey part of the more broadly-based performance management which, at least in intention, distinguishes today’s from yesterday’s approach to managing the human resource. Armstrong (1995) attrib utes much of the f ailure of traditional appraisal schemes to the tendency to make them form-filling exercises, with an emphasis on centrally held records, rather than as notation relating to a worthwhile interview process and something to be used to support continued interaction and discussion throughout the year. One specif ic approach possible in appraisal intervie wing, though one not apparently widely employed, is that of rank ordering strengths on the various competencies covered. Thus the appraisee is not f aced with ratings on an absolute scale or one f ixed by reference to a peer group b ut rather is pro vided with information reflecting relati ve performance one to another of the dif ferent areas rated. This does, of course, ha ve a disadv antage where the appraisal is to be link ed to reward. Its adv antage w ould seem to be its ‘non-destructi ve’ nature (cf a similar ar gument by F ox (1996), with respect to psychometric measures of ability).

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT AND DISCIPLINARY INTERVIEWS Underperformance Interviews relating to underperformance mix tw o strands. One is the exploration of information and, associated with that, the setting of standards for the future. The other is the need to maintain a legitimate disciplinary line with the indi vidual concerned. The f irst of these purposes is something that could be re garded as comparable to the appraisal process. The second, though, can conflict with this and the stating of problems part of the intervie w may in itself mak e either

The use of interviews in managing and enhancing performance 77 party ill-placed to consider a positi ve w ay forw ard. To be gin with, conflict between the tw o parties involved may arise as a result of the discussion unless it is handled with e xtreme care. As the intervie wer may feel himself on the same occasion to be an aggrie ved party this may be problematic. If the person being intervie wed feels that this is the first time that the e xpectations now being aired as unfulf illed are being made clear, they too are likely to feel upset. There will also be pressure on the intervie wer to mak e the discussion as short as possible, both to reduce discomfort and to ensure that what has been said can clearly be noted for the record. In some cases it may be an ef fective tactic to split the intervie w in two; the what is wrong part, and the way forward part. Both may then be addressed in a calmer atmosphere. Of course prevention is better than cure. In an atmosphere in which feedback is gi ven and accepted on a continuing basis in a series of interviews throughout the year the need for the disciplinary intervie w as such is f ar less likely to arise. Thus in en vironments characterised by ongoing performance management, positi ve and ne gative aspects of performance are routinely discussed.

Gross misconduct Disciplinary interviews relating to gross misconduct are, for the moment, separated out from other forms of performance-impro vement interviews. However, note that the dif ferences are not absolute. In some cases, such as theft, the intervie w is seen merely as a formal necessity prior to dismissal, b ut in others there is a potential continuum with other aspects of performance-impro vement interviewing. Thus issues of poor time k eeping or apparent incapacity to deli ver work effectively will in some cases result in the type of performanceimprovement interactions discussed abo ve. Some of these may be entirely supportive, but others may fall in effect into the gross misconduct cate gory. What judgement is made of the starting point may depend on the vie ws of the manager or , indeed, the impact upon a third party. A minor error which results in the loss to an or ganisation of a million pound order is lik ely to be seen as more serious than the same error picked up before it issues in such a disaster. A disciplinary interview is lik ely to concentrate on procedures and f acts. In some cases the interviewee will have the right to have a trade union or other representative present.

78 Effective interviewing

STAFF DEVELOPMENT Development centres Development centres use the methodology discussed under e xtended interviews in Chapter 4, b ut for purposes of staf f development. The same assessment processes typically apply . Ho wever, feedback is usually more detailed and participants may be gi ven a v ariety of further self-discovery tasks to do, as well as detailed instruction in the method of assessment being used. The assessor has several different tasks to accomplish in feedback. He needs to present clearly the information and the ratings to which it leads. Sometimes it may be appropriate to talk primarily in terms of performance on an e xercise-by-exercise basis, while in other cases feedback will need to reflect the results on a competenc y basis. F or the centre participant whose results are summarised in Figure 5.2 there is more consistency of performance within exercises than within competencies, so feedback would generally be conducted on the basis of each exercise in turn. It is particularly important not to get in volved in a ne gotiation on the ratings given but to represent these clearly as the combined opinion of the assessing team. The w ay to do this is to present the evidence – that is, the observ ed beha viour – f irst, follo wed by the evaluation. If the evaluation is given first this tends to result in defensiveness on the part of the centre participant (the intervie wee). By presenting the behavioural evidence first the evaluation given is seen to come naturally, arising logically from what has been presented. In the same way it is not usually a good idea, when giving developmentcentre feedback, to ask participants what they thought of their performance in a particular e xercise, or in relation to a particular competency. If the participant’s view does not accord with the assessor’s this advance declaration of a position may lead to defensi veness and difficulty in accepting the evidence. If the feedback intervie w is to be most ef fective and w orth while, careful preparation of the participant is necessary . This will include detailed familiarisation with the centre processes – ho w the observations are made and ho w e vidence is pooled among assessors. The necessary training and brief ing for this will often be under taken during the centre itself while the assessors are holding their deliberations.

The use of interviews in managing and enhancing performance 79

For participants to receive feedback, they need some explanation and understanding of the competencies. Sometimes brief ing on this is undertaken in adv ance of the centre and this may be particularly so where competencies are common between centre processes and others. In other cases the brief ing on competencies is gi ven on the centre itself, while the assessors are undertaking their discussions. The feedback itself may e xtend to discussion of possible career options and the implications of those. P art of a de velopment-centre feedback interview is shown overleaf.

80 Effective interviewing

DEVELOPMENT-CENTRE FEEDBACK INTERVIEW Assessor: Jack

Participant: Tim

Jack: Well, as you will kno w by no w I’m here to tak e you through the results of our observations over the last two days. All the assessors have had a lengthy discussion about all the participants. You know from the in-basket interview that I studied your work on that e xercise, b ut I’m not just reporting on that. I’m going to tell you about the other e xercises, too, so what I’m telling you about is the combined view of everyone. Is that clear? Tim: Yes, that’s okay. Jack: You’ve seen the competenc y model and understand the terms used in that and you’ve also had a look at the whole assessment process that we are using? Tim: Yes, I’m fairly clear about all that. Jack: Well, I’m going to be gin by talking about the competenc y called strategic vision. That’s the one to do with indicating ho w far you would have what’s sometimes called a ‘helicopter vie w’ of the world of the business. Tim: Yes, I was rather intrigued by that one particularly because I wasn’t at all sure ho w you could possibly f ind that out from the exercises that we did. Jack: Well, it will come out to dif ferent degrees in each of the exercises. Let’s start with the group discussion e xercise. You were all working on that problem of the site for the new administrative of fices to support the three f actories. Your preliminary work had sho wn that you had paid some attention to the costs and you spoke about those quite a lot during the discussion. Tim: Yes. Jack: Now, you did follo w on when Ranjit raised a question of the long-term future of the b usiness to say that your cost model might well vary if, as he was suggesting, one of the factories was actually closed down, so you were able to identify with a dif ferent future and that’ s one of the things that we look ed for . However, you didn’ t indicate that you had thought of that in

The use of interviews in managing and enhancing performance 81 advance. It w asn’t in your notes and you actually said, ‘W ell if that is a possible scenario . . . ’. You also disagreed with Jennifer when she said that it w ould be important to consider dif ferent patterns of w orking in the future with a lot more people being likely to do their administrative work from home. Tim: Yes, I remember that. I w as really impatient at that point because we only had ten minutes left and we had spent a lot of time talking about process. Jack: Yes, a lot of the discussion did go on that. Of course one way of moving that along would have been for someone earlier – and it could ha ve been you as well as an ybody else – to ha ve raised the question of longer term objecti ves and the need to consider the future shape of the b usiness within the process for managing the discussion. That could well have had an impact on the approach taken. Tim: I’m not sure, though, that it’s really fair to think of that exercise as something that w ould really have got us on to a strate gic approach. After all, we all kne w that we had to get in our threepennyworth somewhere and there was a jostling for position and people were trying to mak e sure the y stated their vie ws rather than it being set out as something with a very long-term horizon. Jack: Certainly if someone didn’ t, as you say , get their threepennyworth in and contribute at all to the discussion there wouldn’t have been any behaviour to observe. However, if the view that you had w anted to put forw ard had been a strate gic one then that’s where you w ould have chosen to, as it were, spend your three-pennyworth. Tim: Well, I can’t deny the behaviour as you have presented it and I see ho w it could ha ve been slanted dif ferently though I must confess that I hadn’t seen that at the time and I still w ould not have thought it was the exercise best calculated to produce that evidence. Jack: Well okay, on the basis of what we did see here, though, this performance would not have evidenced behaviour to the standard required of a senior manager in the company with regard to strategic vision and so this would show as a development need. Tim: Okay well I – yes I can accept that for the moment.

82 Effective interviewing Jack: If we mo ve on to the indi vidual analysis exercise you will remember one of the issues put to you w as the marketing implications of a much more integrated relationship with suppliers. Tim: Yes, I felt more comfortable with that because there were a number of echoes of w ork I’d done pre viously in total quality management and I pulled some of that e xperience out in what I wrote. Jack: In f act there w as a lot of e vidence of your thinking at a quite high level and you did refer to total quality . You suggested that there w ould be a need to see if that could potentially run counter to or alternati vely be complementary to those initiati ves – I’m quoting directly from your w ork here. This sho wed evidence of a clear approach to the analytical aspect of strate gic vision. You actually took that further to w ork through some of the impact upon customers and follo wed up with the idea of putting yourselv es and your suppliers in a further partnership relationship with the customer base. There was also evidence later in the paper you prepared when you looked at potential risks, that you had quite a grasp on the possibly changing b usiness situation in terms of ultimate customer usage of the product. Ho wever, there w as little acknowledgement of the impact of all this on people. There had been a clue to this in the brief ing notes, but you really didn’ t do much more than ackno wledge that there w ould be some people impact. You didn’ t talk further about the ef fects of changing work patterns and skill mixes. Tim: Well, I’m not a personnel specialist and I suppose I would have been relying on someone of that sort to pick up that aspect for me. Jack: In strategic vision, though, we would actually want to see a clearer intention of someone setting such an initiati ve in motion even if they did involve another individual or specialist group. Tim: Okay. Jack: On that basis the picture of this e xercise altogether is that this is a competenc y that w as demonstrated to standard b ut it probably would have come out as a clear strength, that is abo ve the standard basically required, if there had been some further work on the personnel side.

The use of interviews in managing and enhancing performance 83 Sometimes the work with the participants goes on to a stage in which they produce detailed recommendations for their own further development action. This may then be the subject of a three-w ay interview involving their direct manager , who probably w ould not ha ve been present at the development centre, and a representative of the training and personnel function. In such a follo w-up interview there w ould likely to be detailed discussion of their expectations and requirements for the future. It may well be that f irst the assessors and then subsequently the reviewing management team will have at their disposal other information about the intervie wee to inform their discussion, such as selfcompletion questionnaires on future career direction.

Other staff development interviews In some cases intervie ws are designed specif ically to e xplore the future interests of staf f members and ho w the y see their careers as developing. This may also give an opportunity to look at areas where there may be performance issues requiring resolution. Ho wever, the main aim of such intervie ws is meant to be forw ard looking rather than ha ving the lar gely backw ard-looking focus of the appraisal system. Such intervie ws may be conducted by staf f other than those routinely involved in appraisal intervie wing. Thus the y may include personnel or HR staff with a special responsibility for development or career planing. Sometimes, again, such intervie ws are supported by documentation with a v ariety of questionnaires often being used in advance. They may also mer ge into the f ield of counselling, which is the subject of the ne xt chapter. How f ar the intervie ws considered here can be seen as separate from counselling as such will depend on a number of f actors. These include the relationship of the intervie w to the b usiness purposes of the or ganisation. In these intervie ws the purposes will be b usiness-led. The link to the b usiness in the case of counselling interviews is lik ely to be less distinct and may e ven be consciously separated further. Also the role of the person conducting the interview will be important. In these staff development interviews the interviewer, if not the person’ s immediate manager is, ne vertheless, lik ely to ha ve some input into decisions about de velopment; questions of resources or mone y for training courses, for e xample. Such interviews may also tak e as a starting point the output from

84 Effective interviewing development centres or other processes which include assessment. A sample staff development interview programme is set out below.

Staff development interview programme Before interview Ɂ Interviewer reviews outputs from other sources (eg development centre, appraisal, career influences questionnaire, psychometric battery). Interview Ɂ Interviewer asks pre-set questions and probes for further understanding. Ɂ

Interview concludes with summary of understanding and action plans for interviewee and interviewer.

After interview Ɂ Action plans written up by interviewee. Ongoing Ɂ Interviewer and interviewee check on actions involving other parties (eg opportunities for job shadowing, course availability). After interval Ɂ Follow-up meeting – status of plans reviewed.

The use of interviews in managing and enhancing performance 85

SUMMARY 1. Interviews used in managing and enhancing performance are directed at existing staff. They typically utilise information already gathered rather than using the interview primarily as an information-gathering exercise. 2. Appraisals involve a retrospective examination of performance. They often become bound up with pay reviews. Behaviourally anchored scales help clarify ratings in appraisals. Training in appraisal processes can underpin more objective use of appraisal systems. 3. An ongoing focus on performance with continuing reviews may preclude the need for disciplinary interviews as such. Disciplinary interviews can be seen as one extreme of performance management interviews. 4. In development centres the feedback interview is seen as pivotal in setting performance enhancement in train. 5. Staff development interviews may be conducted by specialised staff with particular responsibility for development and/or career planning. Such interviews will seek to link individual development to specific business goals and outcomes.

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6 Interviews in counselling and guidance INTRODUCTION Purposes Interviews used in counselling may have a number of purposes, ranging from situations in volving crises such as loss or berea vement, to helping individuals cope with problems or issues requiring resolution, such as initial choice of career or a ne w career direction 1. Although the interview is not the only mechanism used in counselling situations it is central and it would be difficult to conceive of counselling taking place which does not in volve direct spok en interaction between people. Most often this is between two people but there are also applications of group counselling, with one or more counsellors w orking with groups of an ything from four to sixteen people. One counsellor to tw o clients is, of course, a v ery common situation in marriage counselling. Dictionaries tend to emphasise or conf ine themselves to the guidance aspect when def ining counselling (eg ‘to give advice or counsel to, to advise’, Bak er, 1949). F or most professional writers on counselling guidance is seen as a phase or step at most and not the prime purpose. In f act the purpose is more usually described in terms such as enabling the counsellee to understand and to come to terms with the path that he or she should pursue, seeing issues and problems in a 1 Names and addresses of se veral organisations in the UK that are in volved in counselling are given in Appendix II.

88 Effective interviewing perspective be yond the immediate and in the conte xt wider than implied by directly pressing issues and problems. F or instance Burnett (1977) def ines it as ‘a process of interaction between tw o individuals – the counsellor and the client – the purpose of which is to enable the client to reach a decision on a personal matter such as choosing a career or a job, or to w ork through a personal dif ficulty.’ Walmsley (1994) summarises the purpose succintly as ‘to help someone help themselves’. In its Code of Ethics and Pr actice for Counsellor s the British Association for Counselling mak es a distinction between ‘counselling’ and the ‘use of counselling skills’. The former term is reserved for those situations in which two parties agree to enter into a counselling relationship as such. The latter w ould apply when a manager with counselling skills may use these as part of routine interactions with staf f, for e xample in connection with performance management as outlined in Chapter 5.

The general form of counselling Characteristic of man y counselling situations is that the emotional aspects are lik ely to be signif icant. The issues f aced by the person receiving counselling are unlikely to be capable of immediate remedy through the strictly rational process of questioning that would characterise many of the other forms of interviews. One of the things that is stressed in most writings on counselling is the stepped and unfolding nature of the process. In general this applies both to counselling of an essentially therapeutic nature (see for e xample Rogers, 1942) and that e xercised within a w ork organisation (see Sworder, 1977). This ine vitably means that the process is some what extended in time. The most e xtreme forms of counselling, characterised by psychoanalysis, ha ve procedures which last o ver periods of years. Dryden and Feltham def ine ‘brief counselling’ as lasting from one to twenty sessions; even this may take several months. Most counselling situations that arise in relation to w ork, whether crisis-based or not, still e xtend o ver a period of weeks or months. In redundanc y counselling a counsellor tends to remain in contact with the counsellee at least until a new job has been found, or another mode of occupation such as self-employment, arrived at. In selection intervie wing the aim is for the intervie wer to e xtract information so that he can come to a decision, and a secondary aim (if

Interviews in counselling and guidance 89 at all) is to provide information to the interviewee. In counselling situations the focus is upon counsellees understanding the information about themselves that is lik ely to be at their disposal. T o this may be added, particularly in redundanc y situations, information from the counsellor about the job mark et, opportunities for training and so on, but these are essentially secondary to the processes of self-disco very (see Figure 6.1). The form of questioning w ould be dif ferent in counselling. Particularly, but not e xclusively, in counselling related to crisis there will be an emphasis on feelings; it is important to understand these and set them in a conte xt, b ut not to neutralise them entirely . Thus questions designed to elicit feelings – ‘Ho w do you feel about that?’, ‘What w as your reaction to that?’ – will be a common part of the toolkit of the counselling interviewer, who will also need to ask questions of fact to establish what has actually gone on. Rogers, in v arious writings (e g 1961, 1965) placed considerable emphasis upon what he labelled non-directi ve counselling, again underlining the difference between a heavily guided approach and one in which the counsellor pro vides the opportunity for the client or counsellee to mak e his or her o wn e xplorations. He characterised (Rogers, 1942) the non-directi ve viewpoint as placing ‘a high v alue on the right of e very indi vidual to be psychologically independent, and maintain his psychological inte grity.’ By contrast in the directi ve approach the focus is on ‘social conformity and the right of the more able to direct the less able.’ Research quoted by Rogers sho ws some quite drastic dif ferences in behaviour between counsellors cate gorised as either non-directi ve, or directive. F or instance the latter spok e much more in counselling sessions. (The extreme members of two such contrasted groups varied by a ratio of 25:1 in this re gard.) Directive counsellors were found to ask many specific questions, to state their own views and readily make proposals for action. By contrast the non-directi ve counsellors spent far more time restating (ie reflecting) what the client had said and giving the client the opportunity to e xpress feelings. Although these differences appear quite mark ed from the outside it is also reported that the directi ve counsellors did not recognise that the y had tak en a distinct lead. Thus in carrying out counselling one’ s own approach may not be self-evident, and to adopt one or other style routinely may itself require considerable training, practice and reflection.

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Interviews in counselling and guidance 91 The choice between the directi ve and non-directi ve approach may reflect the counsellor’s value system. It may also reflect sheer force of circumstances. The counsellor dealing with lar ge numbers of redundant staf f, with a limited number of sessions book ed and a ware of certain windows of opportunity closing, may be inclined to be directive at an earlier point than if f aced with a potential returnee to fulltime work, or someone contemplating a two-year time horizon. Another w ay in which the interaction between counsellor and counsellee can be understood is by thinking of it as a w orking relationship, whereas in a selection interview, of whatever type, the working relationship has yet to start. There are many books relating to the different issues that can be the subject of counselling: for e xample Wallbank’s The Empty Bed (1992) deals particularly with the se xual dimension of berea vement. Some counsellors will recommend publications to a person being counselled and use this as a means of opening up certain areas of discussion. Others may feel that this smacks of a do-it-yourself approach which could compromise the ef fectiveness of their interactions. However, those being counselled may , in an y case, f ind their way to these books and themselv es raise issues set out in them in connection with their own situation. Books may also help in the decision as to whether or not to tak e up an opportunity for counselling. For example Gough’s Couples in Counselling (1989) is subtitled, A consumer’s guide to marria ge counselling . It seeks to help people understand what is in volved in marriage counselling and whether it may be worthwhile for them.

REDUNDANCY COUNSELLING Redundancy counselling has become something of an industry in recent years with a variety of specialised firms setting up in this area. It is often argued that it is more appropriate for an e xternal organisation to tak e on this role than for it to be conducted internally . There are several reasons for this. It may well be that in times of major change and reor ganisation, such as characterise man y redundancy situations, the natural support mechanisms that w ould at other times be in place ha ve gone. F or instance, in situations in volving mer gers between companies, those charged one day with making staf f redundant may be looking o ver

92 Effective interviewing their shoulders to see if it will be their turn next. It is also common for a considerable de gree of hostility to surround the situation and this may complicate the pro vision of counselling services internally . Where external firms are used a sum of money is often made available for this purpose and ringfenced from other aspects of the termination package to encourage its use. Concerns about confidentiality may also be more apparent with internal rather than e xternal counselling support. Some organisations have, though, successfully gone down the route of relying e xclusively or lar gely upon internal counselling support. When they have done so this has typically in volved the use of staf f somewhat separated from the immediate focus of redundanc y. Although these people may not be themselv es overly secure, there is scope to see them as standing apart from the immediate decisions and perhaps even the immediate turmoil of change in one particular part of the or ganisation. In some cases this may be seen as a w ay of making ef fective use of personnel or other staf f whose roles themselves may have changed. Whether the counselling intervie ws and other interv entions are conducted internally or e xternally, a common process is usually adopted. As indicated above this tends to be a stepped programme. It may start with support for the person making others redundant, and continue until the redundant person has found another occupation. A sample programme in volving the use of an e xternal consultanc y organisation is set out in Figure 6.2. It can be seen that one-to-one intervie w sessions form an ongoing part of this process, interwoven with other activities. As the counselling process progresses the interviews move steadily in the direction of guidance, ultimately taking the form, in ef fect, of the counsellee checking in with the counsellor and perhaps updating the counsellor on how the latest external selection interview had gone. The counselling interactions may also tak e place in an en vironment where there is ready access to sources of information about jobs. Other support mechanisms provided in the same context may include telephone and secretarial services to f acilitate the pursuit of job opportunities, as well as adv ertised and unadvertised vacancies being easily accessible through research facilities. In the earlier stages of e xploration, a number of supporti ve tools are lik ely to be used. Some of these will be self-reflection de vices

Interviews in counselling and guidance 93

94 Effective interviewing where people may list their achie vements and interests, their transferable skills and their strengths. Others may be more formal psychometric instruments such as personality measures. Sometimes, of course, the counsellor will ha ve the requisite skills to deal with the latter. In other circumstances counsellors may use a psychologist or other consultant to support this aspect of their w ork. What is needed is a counsellor who essentially maintains control of the thread of the communication with the counsellee throughout. Among other things this may in volve determining if a particular e xternal intervention is appropriate. Very often in counselling in relation to redundanc y there will be issues that are not immediately on the surf ace. It is part of the counsellor’s role to e xplore things with the counsellee, gi ving him or her the scope to understand and e xpress views. Some of this may be painful at times and require admitting to failings or limitations. There was for some time a theory in counselling that it was particularly irritating individuals who were made redundant, regardless of circumstances: the so-called o yster hypothesis. This vie w has itself been challenged in some w ork by Brindle (1992). Using self-report personality questionnaires he examined personalities of senior executives who had been made redundant. He found these people to be more introverted, astute and anxious than an average group of executives, suggesting a tendenc y for a lo wer rather than a higher profile. But regardless of overall or average findings, counsellors have to deal with the particular person before them, w arts and all. Getting people to recognise they may be displaying inappropriate interpersonal behaviour – such as being abrasi ve, or apprehensive – can be problematic. Such behaviour might well pose barriers in the counselling situation itself and it might well be dysfunctional in relation to future jobs. Displays of negativity or lack of interest in a ne w role may , in particular , strike a wrong note with the recruiting or ganisation. (The relation between negative statements and a variety of negative outcomes has been studied in a number of w ays. F or instance Peterson and Seligman (1988) analysed the content of press quotes from members of America’ s Baseball Hall of F ame over a 50-year period. Pessimistic comments correlated with a shorter life span.) In an y of these circumstances the counsellor may reflect back to the counsellee some of the feelings and ideas that had been e xpressed in order to sho w these in conte xt. An illustration of this is given below.

Interviews in counselling and guidance 95 Client: And that’ s what I felt w as so unf air. I had been gi ven another group of people to manage and nobody had bothered to explain to them what was happening or how things were changing. They were naturally quite demoti vated and took up a lot of my time, which meant I never really got on top of my own group. Counsellor: So you were upset because the situation your company placed you in made it impossible for you to succeed? Client: Yes, and so they got rid of me, which as I say w as unfair. It’s made me realise that before I go into another big management post I need to be very sure what I’m letting myself in for. Counsellor: So you w ould feel w ary about another role with much staff-management responsibility. Client: Too right. Counsellor: Well, your feelings are quite understandable in the light of the experiences you have had. Client: Yes, I just don’t want to be caught out like that again. Counsellor: You might like to think, though, how far and perhaps when you should v oice your concerns to a potential ne w employer. Client: How do you mean? Counsellor: Well, if you voice your concerns at an early stage of discussions with a ne w compan y you may f ind that you gi ve them the impression that you aren’t interested. Even if ultimately you decide you are not you might f ind it helpful, say , in your discussions with other companies to be able to say that company X is still an iron in the fire. Client: I see what you mean. Here the counsellor has mo ved from a non-directi ve to a directi ve style. Although the client’ s behaviour cannot be guaranteed it seems more likely that the direction will be accepted and followed given the clear ackno wledgement early on of circumstances and the feelings attached to them.

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VOCATIONAL GUIDANCE There are overlaps between vocational guidance and redundancy counselling, as both may be concerned with the question of career steps. However, much of v ocational guidance interviewing takes place independently of the crisis of redundanc y. Often it will be undertak en at a much earlier age and, again, there are v arious specialist bodies and agencies working with young people and others in this field. Very often some form of psychometric tool is used to support these activities; this has been the case since the earliest days of v ocational guidance. When the National Institute of Industrial Psychology (NIIP) f irst pro vided v ocational guidance in 1921 it placed special emphasis upon the de velopment of an appropriate battery of tests. (For an account of this see Frisby, 1971.) Vocational guidance interviewing tends to centre on two questions: 1. What skills and capabilities does the interviewee possess? 2. What are the interests and inclinations of the interviewee? Both of these can be addressed through intervie wing b ut both are likely to be supported by ability or interest instruments, such as the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory (see Campbell, 1974). These will then tend to form a basis for an informed discussion about possibilities. In this the interviewer may need to get beyond the surface issues of an interest presenting itself and establish ho w well founded that interest is. One of the interviewing approaches used here is to explore the amount of information that the intervie wee has in adv ance about the role or roles concerned. When high, this is taken as a positive sign of interest and likely commitment to the area. This approach has also been captured in a paper and pencil instrument kno wn as the Job Knowledge Inde x (JKI: Kirton, 1976). This pro vides scales for a range of different occupations. The f ield of v ocational guidance, perhaps lik e that of selection interviewing, is complicated to some de gree by the f act of or ganisations wishing to present themselv es in a positi ve light. In a research programme with a leading public compan y I found that a number of graduates who had joined felt that they had been misled by the glossy publicity literature that had been put out by the compan y in advance. They indicated that much of the staf f turnover among their peers had been due to a failure of expectations. Sometimes it would be up to the vocational guidance interviewer, in f act, to point out what may seem

Interviews in counselling and guidance 97 very self-evident but which could be missed. F or instance, North Sea divers work for a lot of their time under w ater in a dark environment; people w orking in meat packing will ha ve to handle carcasses and various parts of remains of animals to a de gree that is unlik ely to be familiar to them from their perusal of supermark et chillers or butcher’s shop windows. Personality instruments can also give indications on preferences and so suggest which occupations might and which might not fit the person concerned. For example someone who appeared to be averse to getting involved in persuading others w ould be unlik ely to f ind a sales role congenial. Someone with a tendenc y to e xperiment might f it in well with a product design team. In fact some personality instruments, such as Cattell’s 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF), can give quite direct indications of fit to a range of jobs (see Krug, 1981). Perhaps one of the most common besetting problems of the v ocational guidance interviewer is the interviewee, often but not always a young person, who expects to be told about the things that they might want to do. Couple this with some de gree of resentment against authority, and the problem can become magnif ied. Again, processes of reflecting ideas back to the intervie wee are lik ely to be important and, again, it may take a number of sessions, perhaps involving interested parties such as teachers and parents. An example of a vocational guidance session is given below. Counsellor: Okay, John. What I see us doing in these sessions is exploring some of the things that might suit you as a career so that you can decide what possibilities you might want to take up. Is that okay? John: Oh, well I thought you were going to tell me about the courses. Counsellor: What courses? John: Well, I don’ t know do I? But I ha ven’t got an y qualifications and my mum says I’ ll have to go to night school no w if I want to get a decent job. Counsellor: Ho w do you feel about going to night school or evening classes? John: I don’t know. I’ve got this job in a warehouse just now and it

98 Effective interviewing finishes quite early but I’m dead knackered at the end of the day so I don’t know about going out and like studying every night. Counsellor: Well, it certainly w ouldn’t be e very night and ho w many it w as would depend on just what you w anted to do. Did you have any ideas earlier on, before you actually left school? John: Yeah, well, I wanted to be a professional footballer but my dad was dead against it. I used to play a lot for all different teams when I w as at school. I ne ver bothered with e xams and that. Anyway, at the end of the day , I couldn’ t even get a trial. Said I’ve got to w ait another six months. That’ s why I went into the warehouse. It’s a bit boring, but the money’s not bad. Counsellor: So, do you feel lik e w aiting till the end of the six months and ha ve a go at the football, or do you really w ant to think about other possibilities? John: I don’ t know really. My dad said you’ d be able to tell me what I ought to do. By this stage the counsellor has made some disco veries about John, in terms of his interest in football and his w ariness about ‘night school’. He has probably got some w ay to go yet before John be gins to accept responsibility for his own decisions. On the f ace of it academic study, especially when he is ‘knack ered’, seems unlik ely to suit John, b ut really the interview so far has only raised questions and hypotheses for further exploration. Is the footballing career just a schoolbo y fantasy? If John recognises it as such w ould he knuckle do wn to some sort of study course, day-release possibly , if not e vening classes? A session with his parents might establish how much influence they had and how far they were prepared to let their son make his own decisions.

OTHER CRISIS COUNSELLING Just what constitutes a crisis and what form of counselling intervie wing might be required will vary from individual to individual and case to case. It is commonplace that in the minor dif ficulties of e veryday life, to ha ve someone else to share the problem is a w ay of halving that problem. Very often the second party acts mostly as a listening ear and might not of fer an y specif ic support or guidance. Gi ven, though, the increasing literature on the question of stress in the w orkplace (see for example Warr (1987), Firth-Cozens and Handy (1992))

Interviews in counselling and guidance 99 and the e vident w ay in which e ven such informal of floading can assist, it is perhaps surprising that more widespread use is not made of more fully established and formalised counselling in the w orkplace. The John Lewis Partnership is one of those that has established counselling as a routine provision at work. Some commercial organisations provide counselling support in relation to rather specif ic and perhaps dramatic crisis situations. F or instance, a number of building societies and other financial institutions have embarked upon the use of post-incident trauma counselling for those who ha ve e xperienced armed robberies or hostage abductions. Again there are some specialist f irms working in this f ield. Some of this w ork involves one-to-one intervie w counselling. There are also group discussions with a lead f acilitator, with considerable emphasis being placed – as with the initial phases of redundanc y counselling – on getting the feelings out in the open. Part of the process is focused on helping victims cope with their e xperience by understanding the pattern of lik ely stress reactions. This includes anticipation of those negative reactions that might arise in the future as well as reassurance about the likely path to full recovery. The arrangements for this type of support may also include hot-line f acilities so that those in volved can be given rapid reassurance that help is at hand. Police, fire services and the military ha ve also in recent years recognised the v alue of counselling intervie wing and, indeed, their w ork in this field pre-dates the pro vision of trauma counselling in commercial organisations. Some voluntary aid organisations also use interventions of this type in relation to traumas associated with w ar conditions and refugee status. Among those w orking with traumatised children in Rwanda, for instance, unlocking emotions is sometimes f acilitated by getting the child to produce a drawing depicting the traumatic event. Perhaps more systematised historically, and certainly more familiar to many, will be the counselling intervie ws undertaken in relation to marriage guidance and bereavement, to which we now turn.

MARRIAGE GUIDANCE AND BEREAVEMENT Marriage guidance In marriage guidance the intervie wer may deal with the parties individually but the greatest v alue of the interv ention is lik ely to accrue from a joint interview. This can pose considerable demands upon the interviewer. As he or she seeks to establish some initial f acts and the current level of feelings in the tw o parties these feelings themselv es

100 Effective interviewing are lik ely to manifest themselv es not uncommonly in displays of hostility. This is illustrated below. Counsellor: So, w ould you lik e to tell me about why you’ ve come here today? Woman: Well, it’s him and his unreasonable behaviour, isn’t it? Man: I’m not here to have a quarrel but that’s a little rich coming from you. Woman: You were the one who locked up my cheque book. Man: It was the only way to stop you spending money we didn’t have. The counsellor’s next intervention may well in volve an attempt to lay down some ground rules to help establish f acts, though at some stage the feelings and emotions will have to be explored. However, the marriage guidance intervie wer f airly re gularly spots a particular point of friction and begins to point the way to a possible resolution, so heading of f the potential marriage breakdown. Such a case is also illustrated. Man: And we don’t now ever seem to dicuss problems together. Woman: But that’ s because if I say an ything you just say I’m moaning and you are too tired to listen. Man: Well, I come in from a hard day’s work and all I get is what the kids have done wrong or what a dif ficult time you’ve had at the shops, or the car w ouldn’t start or something, and I’ ve had a hard day too. Counsellor: As I understand it you both feel you’ re working very hard now. Before your second daughter came along, and before Jim got his promotion, you both had more free time and more ener gy. That meant that if one of you had a problem the other w as likely to have the time and the reserv e of ener gy to help deal with it. That doesn’t happen now – you’ve both got less time; you feel more tired and there are more pressures on you. That means in turn that something that might not have seemed so big in the past can no w appear really annoying or really w orrying, and if the other one doesn’ t immediately come to the rescue the problem itself seems magnif ied still further and resentment builds up.

Interviews in counselling and guidance 101 Woman: Yes, I suppose that’s what’s happening, but what can we do about it? Counsellor: Well, one thing may be to set aside some of the time you do have together to discuss things, and to decide in adv ance whose turn it is to give some of the problems an airing. That may help you steer away from both feeling you need to offload everything onto the other the very first moment you get together again in the evening. Marriage guidance counselling will also ha ve a part to play when a decision has been tak en by the couple concerned that the y must end their marriage. Then the role of the counsellor is concerned with mitigating the damage of divorce to the couple themselves and in relation to the future parenting of children.

Bereavement counselling Bereavement counselling relates to the processes of grie ving following the loss of a lo ved one. It recognises the f act that grief itself is a natural reaction to loss. The need for counselling interventions in such circumstances is heightened today because relati vely few berea ved people will have the support through local f amily or church networks that was available in the past. Ho wever, clergy as well as other helping professionals such as doctors, will still often be in volved in counselling in these circumstances. The natural reaction of grief to a loss has been recognised (e g Worden, 1991) as in volving a series of four mourning processes, or tasks. First is the recognition that the loss has actually occurred. Ne xt is to go through the pain of grief, recognising and e xperiencing the feelings associated with it. Ne xt is an adjustment to the practical implications of the loss, recognising the roles that were played by the deceased for the survi vor and coping with their discontinuity . This might include learning new practical skills such as household budgeting or cooking. Finally, there is a phase of relocating the relationship with the dead person, which in volves withdra wing some of the emotional energy of attachment, in order to mo ve on with one’s own life, and possibly to form new attachments. Different people will take different times to accomplish these tasks and part of the counsellor’ s role is to appreciate the present stage of the bereaved person, so as to help them w ork through that stage and

102 Effective interviewing on to the next. Completion of one task appears to be necessary before the next can be commenced. Interactions between the counsellor and the berea ved person will necessarily v ary o ver the course of these different stages. F or example, in accomplishing the task of recognition of the loss, the counsellor may properly help by asking questions about the circumstances of the loss or by an accepting attitude when the berea ved person indicates a readiness themselv es to talk about them. At the third stage of handling practical implications, the interactions will involve examining problems faced by the counsellee and how they might be resolved.

SUMMARY 1. Counselling interviews, most commonly one-to-one, are used in crisis situations and in other circumstances where a person needs to be enabled to determine their future course of action. 2. Counselling is usually seen as involving a series of steps, with the counsellor facilitating progress over an extended period often of months or years. 3. In non-directive counselling, pioneered by Carl Rogers, emphasis is placed upon maximising the opportunity for the person being counselled to form their own views about their situation. 4. Redundancy counselling may be conducted by people within the employing organisation or by external consultants. Use may be made of various facilities in addition to the counselling interview as such, including psychometric instruments and secretarial support for job hunting. 5. Vocational guidance counselling involves helping people understand what jobs or careers best suit their interests, aspirations and abilities. Paper and pencil instruments are often used to support these deliberations. 6. Counselling provision in the workplace may be general, reflecting an awareness of the need to help people deal with stress. There is also the provision of post-traumatic counselling focused specifically on those who have experienced disasters or major crime in the course of their work. 7. Marriage guidance may help prevent the breakup of a marriage or may ease the transition through divorce if the breakup does occur. 8. Bereavement counselling begins by recognising grief as a natural concomitant of loss and focuses on counselling the bereaved through the successive natural tasks of mourning.

7 Shifting the focus INTRODUCTION So far in this book the focus of most intervie ws described has been upon the indi vidual: that is, the person being intervie wed has been regarded as the subject of information about themself. (The exception to this was in Chapter 3 where we considered interviewing undertaken in the design of structured intervie ws.) In the present chapter the emphasis is on those intervie w situations in which intervie wees provide information which, by and lar ge, is not used for decisions directly affecting them. There are, of course, some situations in which the tw o strands and purposes are mix ed b ut some a wareness of the possible separation of these aspects is important (see Figure 7.1). In all of the types of intervie ws considered here the k ey point is that the individual being interviewed is regarded as having some special information which can contrib ute to a body of kno wledge and/or to decisions based upon that information. Such a person may not be unique in this re gard and similar intervie ws may be conducted on a number of people.

JOB EVALUATION INTERVIEWING A number of systems have been developed at different times for evaluating jobs – jobs are sized according to dimensions such as complexity, span of control and impact of decisions made. The outcome of such evaluations is used for a variety of purposes but most commonly for matters such as determining pay and grading. Armstrong (1995) captures this by giving a definition of job evaluation as ‘assessing the relative worth of jobs as a basis for determining the internal relati vities’. Necessarily, then, it is a procedure that tends to be applied in

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Shifting the focus 105 relatively large organisations. Job e valuation interviewing and interviews conducted to determine the content of selection methods can both be subsumed under the heading of ‘job analysis’. This is described by SHL (1995) as ‘a systematic process for collecting and evaluating information about jobs’. Job analysis may include techniques other than intervie ws, such as getting job holders to k eep diaries recording their w ork acti vities and then analysing their contents.

Grading and trading Often in determining the eventual grade of a job in this way there will be a series of trade-offs and balances between different aspects. Thus a requirement for a v ery high le vel of specialist e xpertise may be balanced against the need to manage relati vely lar ge numbers of people, so that two jobs such as an individual research scientist and a supervisor of retail staff could, in theory, end up being evaluated at the same overall level. In order to reach the e valuation interviews are typically conducted with those involved in managing the jobs to be graded as well as with those currently doing the jobs. Such intervie ws may be supported by reviewing existing documentation about the job. Thus where there are precedents for particular grade le vels and well-established positions already in an or ganisation, the job e valuation interview may be little more than a formality leading to confirmation of an expected level. In other situations, for e xample where the job is ne w so there are no existing incumbents, there will be a requirement to e xplore the roles in more detail and in those circumstances the interview may well take the form of a structured approach similar to those described in Chapter 3, where required e xperiences, skills and beha viour are explored in depth. In addition to job content and responsibilities other matters examined may include patterns of hours of work. There is, of course, the question of v ested interests in e valuation processes. This might w ork in either direction. Managers might wish to boost their o wn prestige or remuneration by ha ving relati vely highly graded people reporting to them. Alternati vely they might aim to contain departmental costs by k eeping grades relatively low. Such considerations give reasons for ha ving an independent job e valuation interviewer working within the conf ines of a pre-determined system. Such a person may come from an outside organisation or may be from

106 Effective interviewing a separate and specialised department in the same or ganisation as the job being evaluated. Working through the job evaluation process may involve elements of challenge, particularly with new jobs where there may be little or no pre vious experience to follow. Here the value of a standard system, objecti vely operated, is e vident. Very often the approach adopted to finalise job evaluations is to appoint a job evaluation panel, some of whose members will be those who ha ve conducted the necessary intervie ws. They will often be supported by an independent management consultant with special knowledge of the particular weighting system being used.

SELECTION DESIGN AGAIN There are parallels between job e valuation interviewing and producing selection methods. In designing selection procedures, which will of course themselves often include interviews, the various competencies and situations that will need to be represented in a selection situation ha ve to be understood. The methods commonly used, such as critical incident technique and repertory grid, ha ve already been referred to (Chapter 3). Note that the application of such methods will, as with job evaluation, sometimes have a representational aspect to it. Thus there is a question of who should be intervie wed about a particular job as part of this design procedure. Who this turns out to be may depend upon a vailability, and/or the need for their b uy-in to the selection procedures ultimately to be used, as well as the information that the y actually ha ve to contrib ute. The choice of who should take part is rarely clearly laid do wn. This may be something that distinguishes the intervie ws required for designing selection systems from those in volved in job e valuation just discussed. In the latter it may be very evident from the organisational structure just who should have a say, while in the selection situation this may often not be the case. Such decisions should most properly depend on things such as the impact of the role on v arious parts of the or ganisation, b ut this may not be particularly clear.

THE INTERVIEWEE AS EXPERT In situations described so far in this chapter the interviewee is seen as having special kno wledge to contrib ute and is put in the position of

Shifting the focus 107 being something of an expert – the subject matter e xpert or SME, in critical incident terminology . In some intervie w situations this is taken even further, perhaps where a v ery limited number of people have the information required. Sometimes such e xperts are little aware of the particular e xpertise the y ha ve and so sophisticated methods such as the repertory grid may be used to e xplore this. Gathering information from experts is part of the development of socalled e xpert systems in which a computer program goes through diagnostic processes on a v ariety of information, producing reports involving conclusions or recommendations in a w ay in which the individual expert themselves might be supposed to ha ve done. Such expert systems are quite widely applied in writing reports on candidates after psychometric testing. (F or a discussion of this see Edenborough, 1994.) Such approaches also ha ve similarities to some procedures used in industrial design situations under the banner of T otal Quality Management (TQM). F or example in Taguchi techniques a v ariety of approximate methods are used rather than totally e xhaustive design trials. Finding out what may be appropriate designs to experiment with may be achie ved through intervie w methods with experts. Thus the intervie w may be seen as a w ay of leapfrogging what w ould otherwise be v ery lengthy procedures by using the expertise of the interviewee. In some of my own research during the early days of automation in air traf fic control (Green and Edenborough, 1971) I used semi-structured interviews with air traffic controllers to capture their vie ws on the current systems and explore design enhancements.

GATHERING EVIDENCE IN LEGAL PROCEEDINGS An area in which interviewing has been established for a long time is that of legal process. When this involves questioning of a suspect or a defendant as opposed to a witness then, again, the purposes of finding out information and coming to a decision about the person concerned are intertwined. This adds to the comple xity of the picture and is one reason why a v ariety of rules ha ve built up in dif ferent societies to help ensure that information can be gathered in as objecti ve a way as possible and so that indi viduals may not be led into or forced into giving a false confession.

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I’ll take the Fifth! Of course, by the same token, there have been through the ages – and still are today – societies in which systems are deliberately set up so as to encourage people to incriminate themselv es. Thus the range of systematisation is large, from the extreme protection of the individual being interviewed given in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States so belo ved of mo vie makers (‘I will not answer that question on the grounds that I may incriminate myself ’), to the show trials of Stalin’s era in the former Soviet Union. At the time of writing, in the UK there is considerable debate o ver the recent decision that a f ailure to answer questions in court may be seen as self-incriminating evidence. The intervie w processes that are used at the end of the scale concerned with e xtracting confessions may be e xceedingly coercive, involving threat and torture. Brainwashing methods have also been used to convince those being questioned that the suggestions put to them concerning their actions or those of their country in the case of prisoners of war, are in fact true. Such methods involve isolation, deprivation of sleep and very long periods of questioning and haranguing. In the courts the total process of questioning by counsel on both sides may be seen as aiming and tending to elicit a f air balance of information (evidence). Along the way, though, the lawyers may by their questioning seek to discredit a witness or plaintif f. One task of the judge or magistrate in such proceedings is to maintain the balance by controlling the questioning and, if necessary , directing a jury to disre gard answers to some questions. There are, in f act, strict rules go verning how questions may be asked in court. Thus counsel questioning his or her client may ask ‘What happened next...and then what happened?’, but not ‘Did you see him hit him?’, which would be leading. Appeal procedures, of course, often mak e reference to inappropriate questioning either during police interviews or in court.

SURVEY INTERVIEWING In surveys the focus is upon predicting the beha viour of a large group of people from the responses of a relatively small number. In order for representative responses to be gathered it is necessary to balance statistical samples appropriately; that is, the sample needs to be a microcosm – say in terms of gender, ethnic origin or age distribution – of the

Shifting the focus 109 population of interest. Only in this w ay can one properly dra w from the comments of the few conclusions about the behaviour of many. Also, as in all other intervie wing, the w ay in which questions are phrased and worded is significant in determining how successful one is in gathering relevant information. Eysenck (1953) relates the story of the polling agenc y who ask ed the follo wing question; ‘Do you think King George of Greece should be allowed to return to his country?’ The majority of respondents replied in the af firmative. Another agency ask ed which of their respondents had e ver heard of King George, and found that fe w had, suggesting limited v alue in the f irst question about the exiled monarch.

SURVEY INTERVIEW METHODS A wide range of methods and techniques is used in surveys. Some concentrate on indi viduals and others in volve working with groups. As well as variations in ho w questions are framed, there are also v ariations in ho w responses are collected. A number of these methods are now explored.

Focus groups In a focus group a number of indi viduals are gathered together and their views on an issue are e xplored. Very often the comments made are recorded on tape and then transcribed for subsequent analysis. It is not uncommon for tw o facilitators to run the group, with one steering the discussion and the other making notes to supplement the recording. The discussion is led in accordance with some pre-set questions b ut issues that come up are e xplored further. Sometimes these may be matters not originally on the agenda b ut which may be of interest. I have experienced running a focus group with public sector employees, ostensibly on the subject of training. I found that the meeting w ould scarcely progress until those present had got of f their chest a whole series of gripes about remuneration. This e xperience was repeated in the same project with virtually every group involved, with respondents seeing the external research team as representing management1. 1 I saw a tele vision programme about Y orkshire Water and the dif ficulties they f aced with supply during the hot summer of 1995. One intervie wee, when asked for her vie ws, persisted in linking the TV intervie wer with the company in question, despite his attempts to e xplain that he w as a wholly independent journalist!

110 Effective interviewing With another public sector group who had, in f act, had a widely publicised and damaging pay dispute going for some time, a comparable series of focus groups raised not a single reference to pay! One advantage of the focus group o ver one-to-one interview methods is that of efficiency in gathering several sets of views on one occasion. However, this is often less significant than the fact that different participants will have different views and the expression of these will stimulate further debate and discussion. This adv antage also carries with it the potential disadvantage of one strong group member imposing views on the others. Albrecht et al (1993) discuss the need this implies for careful control by the f acilitator. The subtle skills needed by focus group f acilitators, or moderators as he calls them, are also discussed by Krue ger (1988). He describes the control e xerted as, ideally, ‘mild, unobtrusi ve’. He also suggests the importance of a similar style of dress of moderator and participants to help establish rapport.

Panels In panel intervie ws groups of re gular users of a service are gathered together to discuss it in a relati vely formalised way, sometimes using methods similar to focus groups. At one extreme such groups are selfgoverning and may, in fact, call in the supplier of services to hear their views. Thus they can scarcely be regarded as being interviewed at all. At the other extreme such groups will be tak en through a particularly sophisticated questioning procedure. This may be especially so when choices are to be of fered in relation to forthcoming services and enhancements. P anels may also undertak e direct sampling of such services or products, for example tasting new dishes.

Face-to-face interviews Face-to-face interview methods used in surv eys may range from the ‘straw poll’ – in which a succession of a vailable or loosely indicated individuals may be contacted for their vie ws on an issue – to those situations in which a sampling structure is carefully prepared in advance and rigorously applied. Face-to-face interviews conducted on behalf of an organisation and upon the general public pose some problems. Such intervie ws typically involve what are kno wn as intercepts in high streets or other

Shifting the focus 111 public places such as station concourses. Gaining co-operation at all and preserving confidentiality in such a public setting is difficult. It is also unlikely in such situations that any but the very crudest sampling parameters will be able to be follo wed. Thus one might obtain a balance of gender and a spread of ages, b ut the v ery nature of the particular setting used will impose sampling restrictions. Thus passengers at a rail way station will be unlik ely to represent a crosssection of motorists. The y are also lik ely to terminate the intervie w when their train pulls in!

Telephone interviewing In recent years the use of the telephone for conducting intervie ws has become increasingly common. It is particularly so for acti vities such as b usiness-to-business satisf action surv eys, where a third party contacting clients on behalf of a supplier can be seen as being mutually beneficial. With such methods response rates may be v ery high indeed: figures in e xcess of 90 per cent are sometimes claimed. By contrast the use of telephone surveys in consumer work tends to have lower initial response rates. Again, though, the ef ficiency of the method and the scope to use appropriate databases, too, suggest that it may be superior to one-to-one intercepts. Thus with the telephone method the intervie wer may start with a range of information about people and be able to access quite a large group at the outset. With the business-to-business interviews it is sometimes possible to gain involvement of the intervie wee for quite an e xtended period of time of up to half an hour or more. With consumer-related or political surveys a few minutes only is much more the norm. A de velopment in v ery recent years has been that of computer assisted telephone intervie wing (CA TI). In this the computer program steers and tracks the route through an intervie w, thereby permitting relati vely comple x branching among questions and enabling issues of some complexity to be explored more readily than by other methods. The intervie wer sits at a console and k eys in responses as the interview is proceeding. Results are thus v ery readily a vailable for appropriate statistical analysis. Most or ganisations conducting sophisticated surv ey interviewing tend to use this technique. An e xample of part of a CA TI sequence is sho wn in Figure 7.2. Intervie wers who ha ve e xperienced both methods commonly report finding the CATI approach by far the more convenient to use,

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Shifting the focus 113 obviating as it does the need to rif fle through pages of questions to follow a branching sequence.

SURVEY APPLICATIONS Structuring an organisation survey For some years a number of lar ge or ganisations ha ve undertak en survey interviewing of their staf f in order to determine a range of issues. These issues may relate to o verall impressions (feel-good factor), or could be more particular in nature, such as looking at the impact of a compan y initiati ve in communications. Some or ganisations undertake these surveys relatively rarely and without a clear link back into management decision making. Thus the y are seen as just one more source of information which can be utilised on a tak e it or leave it basis. In other cases the y are closely inte grated into management style even with reward mechanisms for managers being related to the comments recei ved back. As such the y have much in common with the 360 degree survey, in which reports from subordinates, peers and bosses are gathered to form a vie w of a person. (Although interview techniques can be used in 360 de gree surveys, printed questionnaires are rather more usual.) There are a variety of steps to be tak en to prepare for the conduct of an interview survey in an or ganisation. Sometimes these steps themselves involve interviewing. Thus focus groups or the repertory grid type of interviews described in Chapter 3 may be used in early qualitative stages to e xplore dimensions of rele vance to be included in a survey. These initial qualitati ve explorations will also be lik ely to look at relevant documentation, including organisational structures and statements, the results of pre vious survey interview programmes and an y relevant literature on recent initiati ves. For example, in companies that have recently undertak en total quality management (TQM) programmes, there may be interest in seeing ho w far messages such as those reflected in mission statements ha ve been understood by staf f. Examination of the content and form of these would be a necessary first step in framing questions for subsequent exploration. As well as determining the playing space, as it were, of the interview survey, the initial w ork will also concentrate on some methodological issues. In some cases it will be appropriate to surv ey all employees, for example if a small workforce is being surveyed for the

114 Effective interviewing first time. In other cases sampling is lik ely to be necessary and it would be appropriate then to determine who is to be surv eyed. This includes both the question of statistical sampling for representati veness and questions of inclusion, ie about which populations one is seeking to dra w inferences. F or e xample, if one particular group of employees has already been surv eyed recently or their part of the company has just been reor ganised, it may be decided not to include them. Distrib ution channels and brief ing procedures to be used in advance of the survey will also need to be examined. Following initial qualitati ve w ork the ne xt stage is often a pilot survey in which intervie w questions are tried out. Questions that appear to lead to general dif ficulty in responding or where there are evident ambiguities will be discarded. The pilot stage can also be used to test the distribution methods used. At the stage of the survey itself interviewers will need to be briefed in detail. This brief ing will include gi ving them a script of responses to cover points of clarif ication that may be needed by intervie wees. After analysis results are reported usually with a mixture of summary statistics and narrative comment. A sample surv ey structure is shown in Figure 7.3.

Scaling in climate and attitude surveys As well as issues of framing the questions as such in surv ey interviews there is the matter of the response scale to be used. Experiments with a v ariety of scales were conducted in some of the early w ork in surv ey methods. Dif ferences were identif ied, for instance, between those in which response le vels given could be seen as cumulative – a technique developed by Guttman (1950) – and those in which people w ould rate agreement on bipolar scales with three, four or f ive points (Lik ert 1932). Dif ferent question types may be used with these very different response scales. When working in interview as opposed to questionnaire mode the number of alternati ves that may be gi ven are lik ely to be more limited. Examples of Lik ert and Guttman scaling are given in Figure 7.4 (page 116).

Political surveys Political surveys may be undertak en in a v ariety of settings and for a variety of purposes. Perhaps most commonly kno wn and the most

Shifting the focus 115

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widely reported are those that are undertak en to inform the public about the general standing of parties or indi vidual politicians. Such surveys tend to become particularly focused on v oting intentions around the lead up to elections and, despite frequent comments to the contrary, are k eenly follo wed by politicians. In f act most political parties conduct their o wn surveys without publishing the results and will privately refer to these as well as noting those more widely available. Privately conducted political surveys may also be used by politicians in order to sound out the acceptability of certain political moves or the significance of certain issues. Although the power of political surveying in terms of the effectiveness of its predictions w as repeatedly demonstrated in the 1930s and 1940s in the w ork of people lik e George Gallup, there may still be difficulties in the accuracy of predicting results. Two main factors are, first, that the state of the parties either o verall or in an y particular constituency may genuinely be f inely balanced. Hence dif ferences found in voting may be smaller than the range of error inherent in any

Shifting the focus 117

118 Effective interviewing such measurement. (See Figure 7.5.) Secondly, in some situations the intentions of people are more volatile than others. This volatility is, of course, what is w orked on during the fe verish activity of an election campaign, so that greatest accuracy is likely to be obtained by surveys conducted as close as possible to the actual date or time of polling. The logistical dif ficulties inherent in this are, in some countries, confounded by limitations on the publication of survey results close to or, indeed, in the midst of v oting. This will be particularly e xacerbated in countries with a range of time zones. In such countries there are often restrictions on the publication of e xit poll results, ie of surveys undertak en with those lea ving the polling station, so that these are not allowed to affect the intentions of those voting later.

Political pseudo-surveys In addition to indi vidual ‘straw polling’ surv eys, findings may also be derived from public meetings or studio audiences. When results of such surveys are published it is usually with caveats about their limited accuracy. Nevertheless they may still ha ve an impact upon further opinion and indeed action. The idea of direct audience responses as a v oting mechanism on TV, ie as a part of a democratic process, has also been suggested in the UK but not yet taken up in practice.

Customer satisfaction and market research interviewing Customer satisfaction and market research interviewing have obvious links with one another. The difference is, perhaps, essentially whether one is looking at responses to what has gone before or what may be coming in the future. The distinction can be blurred in considering enhancements to a product or service and why these might be needed. In some customer satisf action surv eys the intercept method can be particularly po werful. This may be, for instance, in relation to a captive travelling public group or, say, people dining in a restaurant. There are often quite comple x methodological issues of interpretation. Thus in considering the surv eying of patient satisf action with experiences in a hospital the whole picture may be clouded by the degree of distress produced by an illness, the complexity of the issues that may need to be explained in relation to treatment regimes, or feelings of relief and gratitude for some degree of alleviation of suffering. Customer satisfaction work may relate to a range of aspects or be

Shifting the focus 119 focused on a single or a relati vely narro w set of issues. Thus the organisation concerned may w ant to kno w generally ho w it stands with its clientele or it may wish to look at a particular area of service. It may also w ant to e xamine relative levels of satisf action related to different service or product areas. Indeed some organisations publish internal league tables of such findings. In some cases research organisations will conduct composite satisfaction surveys covering several different service suppliers. Usually an y one of these participating suppliers is given access to their own results and that of the group as a whole, so that the y can compare their performance with their competition. Market research uses face-to-face interviews, and focus groups and panels. As well as the intercept another f ace-to-face method used is the detailed pre-arranged interviews. These are targeted on consumers with particular characteristics, such as those who drive estate cars and change their vehicles less than every three years. Quite lengthy semistructured interviews are used to e xplore motivations and triggers for this buying pattern. Once these are understood the car manuf acturers can target their marketing on these points and maintain this part of the market as well as e xtending the tar geting to others who might ha ve similar motivations to be triggered. Market research often uses sophisticated analytical techniques. Thus for products characterised themselv es by a number of dimensions the questioning techniques may need to unra vel these so that overall judgements may be brok en down into dif ferent elements for action. F or e xample, consider the intervie wer helping to research a new chocolate bar, product X. She may ask an interviewee to compare it with existing products Y and Z, made by rival companies. Overall X may be preferred to Y , but Z preferred to X. It could be that Z has a reputation for quality that continues to keep it ahead of Y and X. If X is preferred to Y on grounds of price and both judged equi valent on quality, the manufacturer of X will face a dilemma. If he improves the quality (actual or perceived) of X he may still not match that of Z. At the same time he may lose share to Y, on grounds of price. In order to unravel such choices – and note that only tw o dimensions have been cited here – quite advanced statistical techniques are necessary. One set of techniques was developed by Coombs (1964) for unfolding choices into their dif ferent elements. Other simpler methods are also sometimes used in mark et research, such as those based on

120 Effective interviewing Osgood’s Semantic Dif ferential (1952). F or e xample, using this a product would be rated by intervie wees on a series of bipolar scales, such as hard–soft, good value–poor value, easy to use–difficult to use. Clearly with such techniques the intervie wer has to follow laid-down procedures strictly, a characteristic, in f act, of most if not all of the interview processes discussed in this chapter.

SUMMARY 1. A distinction can be made between those interviews in which the interviewee is the subject of enquiry, as in selection, and those where the interviewee is a source of information. 2. In job evaluation interviewing, interviews are conducted to obtain information on a relatively objective basis, to determine pay and grading. In both job evaluation interviews and those conducted in order to design selection procedures the question arises as to the appropriate people to interview in terms of their representativeness, as well as their knowledge. 3. Interviews are sometimes conducted with those regarded as expert, in order to capture their expertise in a computer-based expert-system. Psychometric reports and medical diagnosis have been addressed in this way. 4. In legal proceedings interview processes are systematised but with methods varying to reflect different positions of defendants, suspects, witnesses and plaintiffs. The status of information – evidence – gathered in legal proceedings is often challenged, with continuing debate over what information given is and what is not admissible. 5. In surveys samples of people are interviewed in order to draw conclusions about larger groups. Question design and appropriate sampling are both critical to success. 6. Methods used in survey interviewing include focus groups, faceto-face intercept interviews and telephone interviewing. Focus groups are often used at the qualitative stage of survey design. Intercept interviews may pose sampling and other problems. Telephone methods include Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI). 7. Climate and attitude survey design typically moves through a series of stages which will include qualitative and pilot work in advance of the survey proper.

Shifting the focus 121 8. Political surveys are largely but not exclusively focused on voting intentions. Despite well-established sampling and questioning methodologies, errors in prediction can occur when the true state of parties is close and/or when voting intentions are volatile. 9. A variety of panel and individual interview applications is used for decision making in product or service design. Statistical techniques used in analysis in this connection are often complex. 10. Customer satisfaction surveys may be used to check on the standards of delivery achieved and to plan service enhancements.

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8 A variety of interview applications INTRODUCTION This chapter explores a range of professional uses of interviews. Very often in these intervie ws both the person and the subject matter are points of interest. F or e xample, a politician may be intervie wed to explore her intentions and to re veal aspects of her personality – can she keep cool in the face of adversity? Perhaps a linking characteristic of all the intervie ws discussed here is, though, that the intervie wer operates from the basis of a body of kno wledge and professional expertise. This is not a complete distinction, of course, from some of the other interviews discussed earlier in the book. Thus in recruitment the interviewer may be an industry specialist – particularly in an executive search – and some counsellors will concentrate e xclusively on counselling. On the other hand journalists may be generalists or specialists in a subject. Ho wever, to a greater or lesser de gree in the interviews considered here the intervie wer brings some specialised knowledge to bear which is used in concert with their intervie wing skills.

JOURNALISTIC INTERVIEWS Interviewing the expert As indicated in Chapter 1, intervie ws by journalists as a matter of routine certainly pre-date selection intervie ws. Sometimes there will be a strong focus on the individual being interviewed as a personality. In other cases, perhaps most particularly when a journalist is putting

124 Effective interviewing together a comple x article, a number of people may be intervie wed briefly but not all of them e ven identified by name. Sometimes when an expert is interviewed in this w ay their motivations for agreeing to undertake such an intervie w may be mix ed. On the one hand there will be a desire to mak e a genuine contrib ution to the matter under discussion. On the other hand there may be questions of self-promotion, and something of this quid pro quo is often – b ut not al ways – recognised. It is by no means uncommon for people intervie wed by journalists to see their words in print out of conte xt or by implication associated with another indi vidual. Sometimes retractions and apologies are printed b ut there is no guarantee that these will be read by those who ha ve seen the original comments and so the damage is done! The only recommendation to those being invited to take part in such interviews is to go into them with open eyes and some agreement on what is to be quoted and what not.

Celebrity and political interviews Whereas politicians may f ind it hard to a void being intervie wed if they are to maintain an y shred of credibility , others of the f amous – sports or entertainment stars or captains of industry – may f ind it easier to maintain their distance from detailed e xchanges with journalists. The w ould-be interviewer may need to spend some time pursuing his quarry, judging when and where to phone or what subject to present as his reason for seeking the interview. A similar process of pursuit may be the necessary precursor to a first interview for an executive search compan y. While for the search f irm with the right name their sign of interest may be a suf ficient bait to entice man y, much executive search work often involves painstaking enquiry and diligent pursuit. Sibbald (1992) entertainingly describes the hapless Schlock headhunter vainly pursuing his quarry , and managing to contact the wrong person at the wrong place and time. Of course, the more celebrated the journalist the more willing the celebrity may be to be intervie wed, so the w ork of tracking the celebrity down will be less dif ficult, and/or done by underlings. This does not mean that the celebrity interview is all plain sailing, even for the distinguished journalist. The f amous often w ant to play things their way. I recall a piqued Muhammed Ali w alking off the set of a live TV intervie w, and the intervie wer announcing seconds later , ‘he really has gone’ with an air of disbelief. V ery often the celebrity will

A variety of interview applications 125 have their range of pet anecdotes and if the journalist wants to avoid a repeat of last year’s or last week’s chat show on another channel they may have to work hard to get on to fresh topics. If the celebrity intervie w is to yield material for a magazine or newspaper one approach is to acquire ‘colour’ in addition to the interview as such. Colour is pro vided by observing the celebrity’ s behaviour and his interaction with his surroundings, including other people. Thus if the intervie w were conducted o ver lunch in a restaurant, observations and subsequent comment might be made on what w as eaten and what w as said to a w aiter or autograph hunter . With an interview conducted in the intervie wee’s home interactions with family members might lend the colour . Although far less formalised, there is an ob vious similarity between the focus on beha viour here and that in an assessment centre (see Chapter 4). In the interview conducted on radio or TV with a political personality, questions are sometimes seen as being angled or loaded, lik e the leading question in the selection interview, to present a particular viewpoint. However, when the journalist says, ‘Don’ t you agree that the government must be in the wrong because it didn’ t warn people soon enough about the crisis?’, the politician sidesteps. ‘Let me answer that by recalling the actions of the pre vious administration’, ‘Let me answer a rather dif ferent point’ and e ven, ‘Crisis, what crisis?’, are all ploys used, with differing degrees of success. The catand-mouse games that ensue often seem on the politician’ s part to involve a voiding admissions of f ault, or def inite commitment to future action. (Though not all politicians ha ve learnt about the dif ficulties that can arise from pledging either ‘ne w tax es’ or ‘no ne w taxes’.) Very often, of course, before such an intervie w takes place there has been some discussion of the approach to be tak en and the likely a venues to be e xplored. To some e xtent then the process of challenge, evasion and pursuit which may enli ven a broadcast interview may, c ynically, be re garded as principally reflecting dramatic flair. Another development in relation to intervie wing a politician is the question of what may be stated on or of f record. There is a practice, calumnified by some, of being able to hold brief ings without attribution. Politicians or their aides are not quoted directly, so it is not clear who has been intervie wed or gi ven a statement. ‘Sources close to’, ‘friends of’ (more for royalty than politicians), ‘unconfirmed reports’

126 Effective interviewing or the all-embracing, ‘it is understood that’ are all cloaks used. It is not clear what purpose this approach is meant to serve; it often adds to confusion and a number of journalists in recent years ha ve refused to take briefings on such a basis.

An interminable diet of seagull One interesting sidelight on this area of interviewing the famous is the format adopted by the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs. In this a well-kno wn person is intervie wed about their life and a picture of their personality and interests is b uilt up. The intervie w itself is interspersed with the intervie wee’s choice of music. The scenario is that the choice represents music that the y w ould wish to ha ve with them if shipwrecked on a desert island. They are also asked about what books, in addition to the Bible and Shak espeare, both thoughtfully provided by the BBC, the y would like to have with them. The format can be seen as some what analogous to the projecti ve techniques, described below under psychological intervie ws, where a stimulus other than a specif ic question w ould be used to pro vide a basis for further e xploration. (I ha ve e xpanded upon this programme a little knowing that today’s broadcast media are highly fragmented and what would some years ago have been wholly familiar to all readers cannot now be assumed to be so. The longe vity of this particular formula is, perhaps, best attested to by the fact that when the programme was originally introduced the shipwreck scenario w as enlarged upon with the explanation, ‘assuming, of course, that you also had a gramophone and an endless supply of needles’.)

Intrusiveness Journalistic interviews have sometimes been criticised where they are seen as intrusive. There is a question of a balance here between what is really ne wsworthy and what is not, and e ven in respect of what is newsworthy ho w f ar one should intrude, for instance, upon pri vate grief. McLaughlin (1986) writing on this subject agrees it is a trick y area b ut maintains the journalist’ s right to e xplore those issues that may be of genuine interest to a not merely curious or prurient public. He talks about e xplaining to parents whose children ha ve suf fered death or injury how their testimony might help save other youngsters. Of course it is not clear whether or not this is lik ely to be the case.

A variety of interview applications 127 Exposing personal grief as opposed to presenting w arnings in terms of facts may not go f ar to making the ne xt child realise the dangers inherent in the stranger’s sweets or the short cut across the tracks. Intrusiveness is also, and more clearly properly , a characteristic of interviews conducted with those deserving of investigation because of their connection with some kind of deception or co ver-up. Investigative journalists seeking to conduct this type of intervie w quite often face threats or actually experience physical injury or prosecution. The v alue of their w ork is well-attested by , first of all, the evasiveness of those whom they seek to interview and often by subsequent successful police enquiries and/or prosecutions. The intervie w, or interview attempt, is often the k ey to securing justice. Sometimes those who are operating outside or on the edge of the la w are prepared in principle to gi ve interviews but may have some wariness about who intervie ws them. This may apply for instance to those reformed (or unreformed) criminals who may be seeking to turn their notoriety into celebrity . It will also apply to protest or under ground movements which ha ve messages that the y wish to see imparted to the w orld at lar ge, but which are cautious with re gard to their o wn security. In both cases the journalist may ha ve to work over a period of months to gain the trust of those to be interviewed.

Promotional interviews The promotional aspect of journalistic intervie ws has already been referred to in connection with the famous. In some cases this is taken further and an intervie w is, in f act, set up with promotion as a main objective. This is sometimes done successfully at e vents such as company conferences where an e xperienced media intervie wer, who is v ery often a celebrity too, will intervie w a senior person in the company and help them get their vie ws across to the w orkforce. The entertainment format of this may help deli ver messages more ef fectively than a written report e ven in a chatty house journal or a more formal public address from the chief e xecutive. Very often the interviewer will ha ve some apparently challenging questions: ‘Ho w can you be sure that the upturn in b usiness will be sustained?’ or ‘Does that mean job losses are lik ely?’ but these will rarely be of f the cuff. However, even if questions and answers are pre-scripted the format has the merit that matters of interest to staf f and shareholders are clearly aired. Such intervie ws are sometimes captured on video for

128 Effective interviewing distribution within companies and may form the basis for further , localised, briefing sessions.

THE ‘POST-EVENT’ INTERVIEW Interviews in event reporting There is a class of intervie ws that are associated with a particular event or e vents happening. Man y of these can be cate gorised as debriefing. At one end they shade into counselling situations, as when victims of traumatic e xperiences are encouraged to talk about and share their e xperiences as discussed in Chapter 6. At the other end they are much more clearly focused upon information, as when personnel are debriefed following a military mission. The e vent may be a planned e xperience (for instance a training course), or an experiment as discussed under psychological interviews below. Alternatively it may be unplanned, as when the police interview witnesses to a road traffic accident. These interviews are usually necessarily conducted by specialists in the field concerned. Often they will work to a tightly prescribed format. F or instance, in debriefing a test pilot follo wing a pro ving flight in a ne w aircraft one w ould systematically e xplore views of the dif ferent systems and handling characteristics of the plane in the different manoeuvres undertaken. In some cases the format will be relati vely open as when trainers, say at the end of a management de velopment course, ask participants for comments. This has the adv antage of allowing those present to v oice any feelings of discomfort. The end of course re view w ould frequently be followed, weeks or months later , by a further re view in one-to-one format. This would still be in essence in debrief ing mode, but now addressing progress in assembling or implementing de velopment plans. Both the test pilot debriefing and the course review would often be supported by written questionnaires.

The exit interview Another specific class of interviews within this general group, ie related to specific events, is the e xit interview. Here an emplo yee who has resigned is intervie wed just before or e ven following their departure date about the reasons and background to their decision. Conducted internally such intervie ws are sometimes seen as perfunctory and as

A variety of interview applications 129 much a matter of form only as appraisal interviews sometimes are. It is commonly said, for instance, that people always claim to be moving for career development or enhanced pay prospects and ne ver because they cannot stand the sight of their boss. There is, of course, a v ariety of sources of complication here. An y overt criticism of the boss could be seen as compromising a future job reference. Also someone who w as not prepared to confront a dif ficult situation in the w orkplace may be even less inclined to do so once the need for doing so has been removed by displacement to another situation through the resignation. Sometimes exit interviews are conducted by third parties and may even be reported upon in a cumulati ve way rather than indi vidually. This approach may encourage the intervie wees that their specif ic comments will not be attrib uted to them and altogether may pro vide insights with a statistical basis. When used in this w ay they can be regarded as coming within the f ield of survey interviewing discussed in the previous chapter. In this connection exit interviews may form a valuable part of the qualitati ve data gathering for a staf f surv ey. If staff who have left voice particular concerns, be it o ver remuneration or sexual harassment, then inclusion of such topics in the surv ey may help identify groups of current staf f potentially at risk of lea ving as well as suggesting a need for remedial action. Such concerns might not be picked up in qualitative work with existing staff either because of reluctance to v oice them while still in the pay of the emplo yer or because, if not general, their impact w ould be diluted by the v oicing of more common issues.

EXAMINATIONS AND INTERVIEWS As referred to briefly in Chapter 1, historically all uni versity examinations were undertaken in the form of a debate or interview between learned scholars and candidates: the viva voce examination. Such sessions might or might not be supported by written documentation. As time went on the written e xamination came more into prominence. However, the oral tradition w as maintained, although sometimes in a some what haphazard w ay. Thus Ball, writing in the late nineteenth century (1880) about earlier practices, declared, ‘Ev ery candidate was liable to be tak en aside to be viva-voced by any MA who wished to do so’. The use of the viva, as it is commonly abbreviated, continues today in the university system. For higher degrees it is a major and for f irst

130 Effective interviewing degrees a relatively minor part of the e xamination method. Particular weight is placed upon the views of the external examiner brought in to see that appropriate standards are being maintained within the presenting institution. P articularly for higher de grees the e xaminers are lik ely to ha ve been chosen because of their academic e xpertise and ability to understand the content of what may be a highly complex exposition rather than because of their skill in intervie wing as such, and questioning techniques and interpretati ve methods are not tightly prescribed. The candidate’s thesis itself will form the basis for the intervie w but it will also typically range more widely across the subject area. For e xample if a particular scientif ic theory has not been written about, the examiners may explore whether this is as a result of ignorance or because it w as not judged note worthy. If the latter , the reason for making this judgement may be questioned and discussed. There is an indication of dif ficulty in utilising the information gathered in this way from a study in which the vivas for the International Baccalaureat were tape-recorded (McHenry , 1996). Judgements made from the tape-recordings were compared with those made directly by the e xaminers in the viva-voce situation. The former correlated more highly with other academic results, which could be attributed to attention being paid to irrele vant information in the face-to-face situation. Interviews are part of other e xamination systems, such as foreign language e xamining, where the candidate’ s ability in the spok en language is assessed directly in this w ay. In the A-le vel system in England and Wales interviews are used to gain supplementary information in subjects in volving project w ork, such as Theatre Studies. Such interviews seem comparable to the in-bask et interviews used in connection with assessment centre methods described in Chapter 4. The academic tutorial system, in which questions are ask ed about a piece of work already undertaken, can also be seen as comparable.

INTERVIEWS IN THE HELPING PROFESSIONS Sources of complexity In a range of professions intervie ws are undertaken to find out information about indi viduals, as part of a supporti ve or helping relationship. These interviews come within general governing codes defining

A variety of interview applications 131 how the relationship should be managed and will themselves typically be subject to rules of conduct. The latter will v ary in their de gree of specificity according to the profession concerned. In all such interviews, whether conducted by a general practitioner, a lawyer, a financial consultant or other helping professional, there are lik ely to be several and broadly common strands of complexity. To begin with the whole subject matter being e xplored may have a complex background to it. Thus the lawyer or the doctor may be seeking to extract information to make a diagnosis against a large number of hypotheses. The questions themselv es may be straightforw ard – ‘When did the rash appear?’, ‘Did you sign the agreement?’ – b ut the overall set of possibilities and the data to be e xplored in connection with them could be v ast. This comple xity is itself lik ely to be increased by the f act that the person being intervie wed will not typically have the same frame of reference, and so may be in a position to volunteer relatively little of relevance. Another source of comple xity deri ves from the f act that in these situations the person being intervie wed, although the y may ha ve volunteered for the intervie w, may be in tw o minds as to ho w much they wish to re veal. Thus there are lik ely to be sensiti vities around financial affairs, the background to, say, a dispute with a neighbour or partner, or the more embarrassing symptoms of an illness. The professional interviewer needs to work within the background of these difficulties and often with time constraints to e xtract the rele vant information. A further constraint in the GP’ s or other medical professional’ s interview is when the patient is not readily capable of responding. This may arise in the case of an accident or collapse where others present may need to be intervie wed to f ind out what happened. It is also the case with a confused patient, a baby or young child. Veterinary surgeons, too, ine vitably have to intervie w owners rather than the suf ferers themselves. One of James Herriot’ s stories is of a group of children bringing their dog to his surgery and describing it as having been repeatedly sick. Only when they take cover as he handles the animal does he realise that what the y are referring to is projectile vomiting; he is then able to mak e his diagnosis. (Further , potential complications have been pointed out by Coffey (1982), who describes how cats being e xamined at the v et’s will purr to placate their threatening surroundings, rather than to show pleasure.) In all of these

132 Effective interviewing situations the third party may have a degree of emotional involvement in the situation that makes them a less than perfect respondent.

Interviews and the allocation of resources There is a class of intervie ws where there is a requirement to assess needs and then allocate resources accordingly , often on behalf of a public body. This may be relati vely straightforw ard, as when an unemployed person signs on for the f irst time for unemplo yment benefit. In other cases there may be endless comple xities to unra vel. For example, consider the local authority of ficer faced with a homeless family evicted from a council property in a neighbouring borough after repeated non-payment of rent, and allegations that they had been guilty of racial harassment of other tenants. In such cases the interviewing officer will be seeking to ascertain f acts, explain regulations and possibly mak e a decision on resources, maintaining rapport and control throughout. The intervie w may start with incoherent ne gativity or abuse from the interviewee(s) and may need to be conducted in a tight timescale; something may have to be sorted out there and then, and there may be other applicants w aiting. Mastery of the technical subject matter and a capability for f irmness are only the starting points in these circumstances. Also required are ef ficient back-up information systems, well-established procedures and willing cooperation with a host of other departments and agencies. Thus, as with many of the other situations we ha ve considered, the intervie w itself is only a part of the story.

PSYCHOLOGICAL AND OTHER SOCIAL SCIENCE INTERVIEWS Projective and other testing methods A brief reference w as made earlier in this chapter to projecti ve techniques. These are methods used by psychologists and others for a variety of purposes. The person being intervie wed or studied is given some relati vely ambiguous material upon which to reflect and comment. The idea is that the intervie wees project themselv es on to this ambiguous material, so that their responses reflect their attitudes, personality and typical behaviour. Best known of these approaches is the Rorschach ink-blot test in which ambiguous shapes are sho wn to

A variety of interview applications 133 interviewees who are then ask ed to indicate what the y suggest to them. (The use of ambiguous material in question content w as encountered in Chapter 4 in the discussion of the Structured Psychometric Interview.) Projective methods have been used in selection and in counselling. In terms of the former, one application is the defence mechanism test, used for man y years by the Ro yal Swedish Air F orce in connection with the selection of pilots. This presents candidates with v ery brief exposures of pictures that can be interpreted as portraying threat. Those who recognise threat in the pictures are regarded as more likely to be aware of threats in the air and so more effective military pilots. Interviews may also form part of some psychometric testing procedures. F or instance, within the W echsler Adult Intelligence Series some particular questions are ask ed orally. For psychometric testing of young children or people with learning disabilities an intervie w format is common. A mix of intervie wing and paper -and-pencil psychometrics is also f airly standard in assessments by educational psychologists, for example in connection with dyslexia certification.

Interviews and research In experimental psychology individuals (subjects) are asked to undertake a task and their performance is examined in the context of one or more hypotheses link ed to a theory . F or e xample an e xperimenter might have a theoretical view of how a stimulating environment helps learning. This could lead to a hypothesis that preferred background music improves learning while non-preferred music hinders learning. A number of subjects w ould undertake a learning task with preferred and a number with non-preferred background music and their retention for the learnt material compared. Interviewing may be in volved in this situation at the be ginning of each experimental trial, to establish musical preferences. It could also be involved in collecting the data on performance if the e xperimenter were interested in learning e xpressed orally. An interview might also be held as part of a debrief ing process after the e xperimental trial, to confirm the musical preference, to gain a rating of the difficulty of the task or to check that there were no extraneous influences. In fact very often these post-trial ratings are gathered by means of written questionnaires rather than intervie w. This may reflect e xperimenters’ concerns that o verly subjecti ve impressions may intrude if subjects

134 Effective interviewing are asked to talk about their e xperiences. This concern stems from a host of dif ficulties percei ved with so-called introspecti ve methods which pre-dated experimental psychology as such. In some studies on dif ferent cultural groups, for e xample those conducted by anthropologists, the intervie wer is seeking to e xplore a society other than their o wn. This poses a v ariety of challenges. The researcher may need to w ork through an interpreter or alternati vely learn the language of the group in which he is interested. Dif ferent societies will have different rules about who may be addressed at all, who can be talk ed to unchaperoned or what may be discussed with a stranger. Certain topics may be a voided entirely if questions are framed in the wrong w ay, or at the wrong time. It is said that Malinowski, studying the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands in what is now Papua New Guinea, came to the vie w that they were unaware of the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy. However, when he re-framed his questions and ask ed them in a dif ferent setting it became apparent that the y were not so nai ve. Not surprisingly those undertaking such researches often spend v ery long periods – often several years – with the subject of their w ork and will complement their interviewing with observations.

Other formalised interview techniques The repertory grid and critical incident methods discussed in Chapter 3 are among other intervie wing tools used by e xperimental psychologists in their in vestigations. Another is the Q-sort technique. This method, first described by Stephenson (1953) in volves a card-sorting task. Interviewees sort statements into piles according to how well they fit their view of themselves or someone else, depending on the application. Thus for individual personality assessments or psychiatric investigations (for example Block, 1978) it is ho w the interviewee describes himself in this w ay that is the focus of interest. In other cases Q-sort ratings are made about others by a number of e xpert raters acting as subjects. Then the ratings can be used in the same way as experimental outputs in testing hypotheses or in b uilding up a theoretical position. The Q-sort w as used in a longitudinal personality study by Block (1971) in which his raters assessed indi viduals in adolescence and in their 30s. The sorting in the Q-sort is controlled so as to represent a normal or bell-shaped distrib ution (for a discussion of the normal distrib ution

A variety of interview applications 135 see Edenborough, 1994). Thus the 100 statements are required to be placed in nine categories, from most characteristic (positively salient) to least characteristic (ne gatively salient) as follo ws: 5, 8, 12, 16, 18, 16, 12, 8, 5. (This idea of a controlled distrib ution for ratings is one that we encountered in Chapter 5 in the discussion of appraisals.)

MANAGEMENT REVIEWS Another area of application of intervie wing is in re views of management in connection with major changes. These include mer gers and acquisitions, joint v entures or mo ves into ne w lines of b usiness. In each case there is a group of managers actually or potentially in place whose capabilities and attitudes can critically affect the success of the changed or ne w operation. Looking at them indi vidually, as a whole and in relation to other groups with whom the y will ha ve to interact can give the or ganisation leading the change a greater understanding of what it has just bought, what it might be buying or whether plans to launch a ne w product or service are viable with this team to implement it. Variations on this theme include assessing candidates for top jobs in an or ganisation newly acquired, say by a v enture capitalist seeking to reorganise and redirect it. Ideally such assessments w ould be complemented by those on e xisting (or remaining!) management teams to understand the f it between the old and the ne w, the possible management challenges facing the new top person and how he or she is likely to manage then. Limitations and risks associated with f ailure to undertak e assessments in such circumstances ha ve been attested to in a number of studies (e g Smart, 1998; KPMG, 1999). The need for such formal assessments was also something that I first raised in print some seven years ago (Edenborough, 1994). Their use, though, is still emer gent rather than well-established. Among the dif ficulties often cited are those of access to the relevant people and problems of using what can be seen as intrusive methods. The former is certainly something of an issue in hostile tak eover situations. Ho wever once a deal has been made this issue tends to disappear and does not generally arise in other change situations. Intrusiveness may still remain a problem for some forms of assessment; for instance psychometrics could often well be contra-indicated. This points to the use of intervie w methods as representing an approach most lik ely to be ef fective and generally acceptable.

136 Effective interviewing Structured interviews, as discussed in Chapter 3, are most commonly used in these cases. However their content tends to cover both areas of competency and some of the current moti vations and concerns of those interviewed.

SUMMARY 1. In a range of professional interviews the interviewer uses particular knowledge to inform the approach taken and the interpretations made. 2. In journalists’ interviews with experts, celebrities and politicians information may in effect be traded for a platform to make a point or to maintain a high profile. 3. Journalists’ attempts at interviewing are not always welcome. The celebrity may wish to preserve some privacy, the dramatically bereaved to keep their grief private and the crooked to avoid disclosure. 4. Interviews following specific events are used to gather information about those events, sometimes to help plan future activities. Exit interviews may help shape policies and procedures. 5. Interviews have been used in connection with academic examinations for many years and, although less widespread than formerly, are still employed in this way. 6. Interviews conducted by members of a variety of helping professions are undertaken within a regulated framework. They are complicated by factors including unwillingness or inability of interviewees to co-operate fully. 7. Psychologists’ and other social scientists’ interviews may use specialised techniques or involve special materials. The focus may be upon the individual interviewee, as in assessment, or make use of a number of people in pursuing a research aim.

9 The future of interviews INTERVIEW RESEARCH Lots of studies, but limitations As pointed out in Chapter 1, intervie ws are popular and, as indicated throughout, extremely widespread in their use. There has certainly been a lot of research into intervie ws but this has been limited in scope in relation to the v ery wide range of intervie w applications. By f ar the greatest number of studies ha ve focused on emplo yment interviewing, followed at a distance by those concerned with counselling and career development, appraisal systems and the lik e, and opinion formation as in market research. The f ield of professional intervie wing – that of the lawyer or doctor – as a research area has been very largely neglected. Even though studies in the employment interview can be numbered in hundreds, methodologies ha ve been limited or fla wed and the number of studies in itself may not be huge in relation to the extent of usage. As f ar back as 1954 Bello ws and Estep calculated that some 150 million intervie ws took place e very year in the United States of America. A few years previously, though, one of the first comprehensive re views of emplo yment interviewing (Wagner, 1949) reported that of 106 studies examined, quantitative evidence was given in relation to only 25 of them. There is, too, the question of methodologies in research. There are difficulties of access of data and co-operation and, as Ulrich and Trumbo pointed out in their review over 30 years ago (1965), there are problems of separating out in research the contrib ution to predictions of success made by the intervie w as such, and other sources of data such as CV information. More recent surveys (eg Anderson, 1992) are still critical of research methodologies and models.

138 Effective interviewing Such research that has been undertak en has more often than not attested to limitations in what has been called here the con ventional interview. The contradiction between this state of af fairs and the strong desire to intervie w was underlined by England and P atterson (1960) when they called for a moratorium on publications about ho w to interview until research e vidence on the reliability and v alidity of interviews was stronger. The continued popularity of the interview is, though, everywhere manifest. Thus Bevan and Fryatt (1988) reported that of 320 UK-based organisations surveyed only two or 0.6 per cent never used interviews for selection and 82.2 per cent used them for all vacancies. A number of those reflecting on the continued popularity of the emplo yment interview have speculated as to why it should be so persistent in use. In considering reasons, Arv ey and Campion (1982) mention among other things the continued f aith of interviewers despite contrary evidence. They go on to outline several studies in decision making which sho w ho w f indings on intervie w limitations may be systematically ignored. This includes the relati vely simple fact of emplo yment interviewers actually recei ving relati vely little feedback about their judgement. The y go on to mak e a plea for written guidelines on how to interview to be more evidently founded upon research results. Most of those who have reviewed interview research in recent years have tended to point out areas that ha ve been ne glected. Thus Anderson (1992) claimed that the areas of impression management, dysfunctions in intervie w information processing and decision making and effects of different distributions of situational power were all under-researched.

Impression management – putting a good face on it Impression management, or the conscious manipulation of the impact made by the intervie wee upon the intervie wer, has parallels in the field of psychometrics where impression management scales of v arious types, including faking good, are often used. As in that situation, though, the question arises as to whether impression management is necessarily a bad thing. Gi ven that the intervie w seems calculated to reflect aspects of social functioning and these do ha ve a relevant part to play in man y roles, then some capability to manage impressions – you only have one chance to make a good first one – seems appropriate. It must ine vitably confound science at the le vel of what research

The future of interviews 139 question should be asked, ie are we really interested in the impression made in the absence of such management? One example of a study on impression management may serv e to illustrate this point. F orsythe et al (1985) found that the selection of female applicants for management positions w as influenced by their style of dress. Those in a more masculine style had a better chance of selection. Was this intervie w beha viour, whether consciously calculated or not, something which would be sustainable in work situations and with the same ef fect of creating a positi ve impression there? In fact Anderson himself recognised this point in re viewing the area of dysfunctions by saying that dysfunctions in perception may in man y roles be effective latent predictors of successful performance.

Who is in charge? The point about situational po wer is that the v esting of po wer in the interviewer unbalances the interview situation. Thus the interviewer is licensed to ask information in w ays that w ould not normally be reflected in the interviewee’s own scope for questioning. It would, for instance, be seen as OK for the intervie wer to ask interviewees about their present salary , b ut not vice v ersa. This is notwithstanding the fact that intervie wees might ha ve a genuine interest in f inding out about the pay for a job to which the y might ultimately aspire. Indeed Herriot (1987) suggested that there should be a deliberate manipulation of the po wer dynamic, so that the focus of the intervie w started with acquaintance formation on something of an equal footing between the intervie wing and intervie wed parties. Changes in, and manipulation of, such dynamic aspects of the intervie w are, however, relatively unresearched.

The interview and the employment decision Also unresearched and perhaps scarcely considered are the dynamics of the employing organisation in terms of the role of different parties to the interview and, indeed, the whole selection process. As a management consultant I ha ve had man y discussions with junior personnel officers (and indeed not so junior personnel directors) to the effect that management won’t play by the rules. Planned intervie w structures are set to one side, arbitrary criteria are introduced and decisions made after the interview, sometimes even by people who were not originally

140 Effective interviewing intended to be involved in the process! This area, part of the sociology of the interview situation as a whole, seems to have received little or no research attention as such. It can be seen, perhaps, as link ed to the question of ethics in intervie wing. Fletcher (1992) pointed out that although much discussed, what does or does not constitute ethical behaviour in job interviews is not, in fact, well established. His survey of interview practice in connection with the uni versity milk-round showed, for instance, 20 per cent of candidates admitting that the y were seldom completely honest in intervie ws and 15 per cent of interviewers indicating that the y felt it to be ethically acceptable to taperecord an interview without the candidate knowing. There is work to suggest some of the f actors strictly extraneous to the interview that may ha ve a significant part to play in emplo yment decisions. For instance Newman and Kryzstofiak (1979) sent CVs of a black and a white applicant to a number of emplo ying managers. When the managers thought they were taking part in a research study they were in general more f avourable towards both candidates and to the same e xtent. When the y thought the y had recei ved details of genuine applications the y were less f avourable overall, and appeared to base their decisions on the applicant’ s colour. How the processes that these f indings reflect could sho w themselves in interaction with an interview programme is, in the absence of research, a matter of speculation. Arv ey and Campion (1982) sa w questions of accountability and associated situational f actors as a hole in intervie w research. It does not appear to have been filled subsequently! Clearly future research in this field is likely to be driven, as much as anything, by equal opportunities concerns. Thus one could ha ve a situation in which a strict intervie w procedure has been follo wed but its results set aside, that is, another process interv enes which may be prejudicial. The will to undertak e such research may be precipitated by an increase in litigation about discrimination in employment and a shift in its focus. Currently in the handful of cases that are brought in the UK the emphasis is as often as not upon specif ic techniques of selection but not upon the interplay of these with the more shado wy aspects of emplo yment decision making. Examination of relati vely long-term records may be required to establish systematic discrimination of this covert nature. A specific factor leading to research of this type may be some of the positi ve-action programmes designed to remove inequalities in the w orkplace, such as the UK Go vernment’s

The future of interviews 141 Opportunity 2000 programme aimed at increasing the number of women in senior management positions.

Further research in structured interviews Structured interview methodology certainly seems to be increasing in use. As pointed out in Chapter 3, though, without research and control its more advanced forms can rapidly degenerate into an unresearched and uncontrolled procedure, perhaps being no more than a properly conducted more con ventional interview, ie one pursued in the absence of the horror story dimension. Further research does, though, seem lik ely in this f ield for se veral reasons. First, the whole of the competencies mo vement appears to provide a groundswell for structured methods and a recognition that they require to be properly set up. The SPI technique is ideally predicated upon this research being conducted afresh for each new application and this is a gro wing area. At the time of writing, there are at least five management consultancies in the UK alone w orking fairly actively in this field. For such research to be made more widely available may require the de velopment of user groups and the lik e. It will also be important for those conducting meta-analytical re views to be quite clear about the types of intervie ws that are being discussed and the research basis of these. For instance the practice in training in the use of SPI and, indeed, other structured interviews, varies from intensive courses for those making interpretations to a situation in which second- and even third-hand briefing of interviewers is given!

CHANGING PATTERNS OF EMPLOYMENT No jobs for life Much has been written about the changing nature of emplo yment in the UK and elsewhere, with writers such as Handy pointing out some years ago now (1989) that some of the old certainties in the emplo yment scene have changed irreversibly. For many, the supposition that employment was, if not for life, at least for a very long time has gone. Yet e ven no w man y of those in emplo yment in the UK ha ve been working for the same compan y for many years, so the full impact of changing periods of emplo yment may be still to come. The o verall picture is in f act quite unclear, with some writers such as Coutts and

142 Effective interviewing Rowthorn (1995) while pointing out the extreme diversity of forms of employment in the UK, claiming that the trend towards diversity may have slowed.

Employment and interviewing The effect of changes in emplo yment upon intervie wing practice are several-fold. To be gin with, one of the areas in which con ventional selection interviews ha ve appeared to ha ve been quite ef fective is exploring motivation for work (Ulrich and T rumbo, 1965). However, the form of this motivation now appears to be changed. Quite a lot has been written (e g Holbeche, 1995) about shifts in the psychological contract between emplo yer and emplo yee. What is claimed is that there is a mo ve from a contract implying security and continued promotion in return for loyalty, hard work and continuing contribution to performance. This is replaced by a new psychological contract, one in which an employer seeks to enhance the employee’s employability in response for flexibility and preparedness to make a variety of sideways moves and undertake retraining but without guaranteed promotion (see for example Prior, 1996). Nevertheless, it may still be that from the intervie wee’s point of view there will be an o verhang of pre vious long-term emplo yment expectations. Those applicants who ha ve been unemplo yed for some time or who fear unemplo yment in their present role may be inclined to seek to demonstrate their potential for long-term commitment even if, in f act, it is unlik ely to still be called for by their potential ne w employer. The same set of f actors may well produce e xtreme caution on the part of interviewees. They may seek to explore the opportunity potentially on of fer in some depth, to see just what sort of f ire they may be jumping into if they leave their present frying pan.

Career management The change in emplo yment patterns also carries with it some other implications. The recognition by an increasing number of or ganisations that the y have responsibilities in the f ield of f acilitating career management is one. By career management is meant a v ariety of processes including career planning from the indi vidual’s point of view, and succession planning and other aspects of resource planning

The future of interviews 143 from the or ganisation’s position. The increasing and increasingly professional use of procedures such as the career planning interviews discussed in Chapter 5 will be one aspect of this in the future. So too, seems to be an increasing recognition of the role of counselling interviews in general in relation to emplo yment. Counselling will be required for those, still probably lar ge in number, who will need for the first time to f ace up to the possibilities of periods of unemplo yment or major switches in career direction. Counselling interventions may also be triggerd by organisations recognising the fact of continuing change and the need for a wide exploration of new employment realities, both positive and negative for their employees. Another sense in which employment-related interviewing will be likely to change is in relation to people w orking for or ganisations on a short-term, contract, project, temporary or seasonal basis. The motivations of these people will ideally be dif ferent from those of permanent full-time staf f, and this will need to be reflected in the interviews. It seems unlik ely that the y could reasonably be expected to buy into the ethos of an emplo ying organisation in the lifetime sense, as may ha ve been required before. Ho wever, the y may be required to ha ve a v alue system which not only supports their pattern of emplo yment on an indi vidual basis b ut also supports ef fective deli very in these circumstances. Thus commitments to o verarching concepts such as T otal Quality Management (TQM) may be among the things that will need to be look ed for in the future in the emplo yment intervie w for this whole set of employees. The changing employment scene seems likely to carry with it, too, an increase in the area of briefing interviewees for the interview situation. There are, of course, a variety of publications and other forms of guidance for those changing jobs, such as P arkinson’s (1994) book Interviews Made Easy or Fletcher’s (1986) How to F ace Interviews. At present we may be at a transition point. I ha ve been in volved personally in both counselling and emplo yment interviewing in the last few years with man y who ha ve said that the y ha ve not had to consider themselv es for intervie w for 10, 15 or e ven 20 years past. That such people present themselv es relatively unprepared and in a state of some anxiety in relation to the whole situation in which the y find themselv es is not surprising. Such a situation also, of course, implies the need for the v arious forms of grooming, practice and support for the interviewee.

144 Effective interviewing

CHANGING PRACTICES Regulated interviewing In Chapter 8 we discussed those types of interviews which are strictly regulated, with f inancial services being one e xample. At the time of writing, though, there is a considerable disquiet in the pension side of the financial services industry o ver the lar ge number of people who have been poorly advised by those who have taken them through such interviews. Clearly, altogether, the process is not w orking well e ven though, perhaps, the rele vant f acts ha ve been gathered in a strictly regulated interview situation. Whether this is lik ely to result in a seachange in intervie wing practice here or simply an e xtension of the regulation to post-intervie w considerations or other aspects of the whole financial advisory scene is as yet unclear. In selection the debate on the ethics of intervie wing has, at the time of writing, advanced little since Fletcher’s (1992) discussion. It is possible that equal opportunities-inspired litigation and an extension of legislation on ageism may crystallise further what questions can be ask ed and the conte xt in which the y are interpreted and decisions made. On present form, though, it w ould be mistak en to look for o vernight changes in the regulatory framework for employment interviewing. In the f ield of medicine in the UK there is a major uphea val in terms of roles and responsibilities. W e may again e xpect to see changes in the type of intervie wing practices that are required. If primary health care is designed more and more to treat the whole person then the procedures to f ind out about the whole person’ s requirements may need to change. These changes may e xtend to developing different interviewing skills among GPs and the distrib ution of intervie wing skills more widely among other health-care professionals.

The political interview In the field of political interviewing much has been criticised in terms of the intervie wee’s – the politician’ s – tendenc y to a void gi ving straight answers to questions. A v ariety of f actors leading to widespread disillusion in present political arrangements may see some changes in the type of response deemed as acceptable from politicians being intervie wed. Just ho w this will af fect ho w the intervie wer

The future of interviews 145 conducts him or herself is unclear . Political disillusionment is by no means new and may be c yclical. (The 1960s calypso-style Limbo song intoned ‘ Went to the mark et and what did I see – limbo, limbo like me – politician telling lies to pr ove his integrity’.) Whether there will be ne w politicians paralleling the concept of the ne w man, and prepared to tell it as it is must still be questionable.

Customer-focused interviews Increased business competitiveness and the continuing scope to use customer responses to dri ve b usiness programmes seems lik ely to result in e ver-increased use of the customer intervie w. There may be an increased need for regulation and control here, for instance to curb the common practice of making a sales pitch under the guise of a market-research interview! The increased signif icance of customer research as a whole and within it the part that interviews will have to play is also indicated by the enhanced technological scope to customise goods and services. Thus historically in manufacturing, economies of scale were often the drivers of what w as produced, as summed up in Henry F ord’s offer, ‘Any colour you like as long as it’s black’. Today with scope for finetuning production and inventories with the use of a variety of methods including Just-In-Time (JIT), there are opportunities for v ery close customising, so that quite f ine-grain customer information can actually be used.

SURFING THE COMMUNICATION WAVES In discussing the structured interview methods in Chapter 3 I referred to an ongoing resistance to the use of the telephone. Certainly the scope to meet people and interact with them sometimes seems an allpervading force dri ving the continuation of something lik e the conventional interview in many fields. (That this does not absolutely have to be the case is well attested by Clark e’s work on the selection of under graduates, described in Chapter 2.) The telephone has advanced as a piece of technology . It is no w perfectly feasible to conduct interviews by phone with a recording of the intervie wer and use of the standard k ey pad for entering multiple choice responses. Similar methods have, of course, been available for years for TV audience research. Resistance there will still be to such methods, (writing

146 Effective interviewing in 2001, six years after f irst drafting this book, I ha ve again come across cases of extreme reluctance to exploit this piece of nineteenthcentury technology in intervie wing) but inevitably Luddite sensiti vities seem lik ely to dissipate in response to competiti ve pressures. These techniques are, surely , lik ely to become commonplace in consumer interviewing and as indicated in this chapter moved into the screening end of mass recruitment, and then … who knows? Very commonly the state and con venience of transportation and communication technologies is rele vant in determining ho w an interview is to be conducted. I noted a mark ed increase in enthusiasm for the telephone interview from a client who realised that his star candidate w as f ifteen-hundred miles a way and for whom he required a report within 24 hours. Consider the case of King Henry VIII, who contracted an alliance with his fourth wife, Anne of Clee ves, before having seen her, ie without having interviewed her, and on the basis of the portraiture, in this case apparently unduly flattering, of the court painter Holbein. That this monarch’ s matrimonial alliances were unfortunate in three out of his other f ive attempts may suggest that a face-to-face interview would not have done much to change the situation. The point is, though, that in seeking an alliance with a foreign princess the King, and other princes of his era, were often obliged to dispense with the interview as a tool, and court portrait painters were quite routinely employed in this connection. In addition to the post and the telephone, other technologies for distant communication are increasingly a vailable b ut still relati vely little used in intervie wing situations. The e xception is, of course, in the broadcast media where interviews are very commonly undertaken with people in distant studios or outside broadcast locations. Business tele-conferencing procedures may be increasingly used within organisations b ut the technology is not generally a vailable for selection interviews as such. There may well be continued resistance to this. Tele-working in general is not widely practised and though it seems likely to increase in the future it is not clear that this increase will be rapid. It may be that it will tak e a major change, perhaps an en vironmental or transport disaster or some repeat of the early 1970s international oil crisis, to precipitate the use of these technologies more widely. There will, perhaps, still be a hank ering for the social interaction possibilities as per the subjecti vist-social perception vie w of interviewing discussed in Chapter 2. This social element may actually be

The future of interviews 147 afforded by v ery high-quality technology in the form of interacti ve TVs and tele-conferencing services. Elements of counselling are, of course, routinely conducted remotely by the Samaritans or ganisation and it may , eventually, be more generally recognised that a physical presence is not necessary for an intervie w to be held. On the other hand again, E M F orster’s 1911 story The Machine Stops depicted a society in which communication was remote, using a form of technology equivalent to today’s e-mail and Internet systems and with v oice communications as well as the physical deli very of goods and services. Ho wever, this multi-media society w as seen as essentially carrying with it the seeds of decay and the story ends with the machine breaking do wn and the consequent redisco very of the v alue of direct interaction. (It is of note, perhaps, that at the time of writing there is debate about the future of Internet shopping, with shoppers being found to be happ y enough to bro wse electronically b ut still largely wedded to making purchases in person.)

Interviewing and the Internet So what of the Internet in relation to intervie wing? The e ver more pervasive ef fect of this major technological de velopment elsewhere seems evident. References to Internet addiction have been made for at least the last six years (see, for e xample, Hamilton and K olb, 1995), with estimates e ven then of tw o to three per cent of the United Kingdom’s online community spending most of their w aking time actively using this medium. Its practical impact on the w orld of interviewing does not, however, appear to be enormous. The psychological testing community has been much e xercised by the possibilities and the dif ficulties. Thus F ox (2000) suggests ‘the advent of the Internet – lik e the atom bomb – preceded the e xpertise to deal with the problems it creates’. T est publishers ha ve been at pains to e xploit the opportunities whilst managing the problems. Amongst the latter are questions of control, authentication of the person taking the test and protection of the publisher’ s intellectual property rights (Bartram, 1999). All of these are of course virtually identical with those applying in the case of telephone intervie wing with a structured intervie w. Indeed if one tak es the case of the SPI – as discussed in Chapter 3 – the use of remote delivery brings this even closer to Internet testing. One could ar gue that with the scope for simultaneous remote v oice and/or te xt presentation whether one

148 Effective interviewing regards a particular tool as a test or an interview is merely a matter of perspective. Thus Bartram (1997) described AT & T’s work in the use of voice response technology in terms of, ‘candidates “dial a test” and the questions are spoken to them. They respond using their telephone keypad’. This sounds v ery much akin to the procedures described earlier in this section, originally , written in 1995, b ut which are described as interviews! Perhaps the point behind this is that there may well be – though it really has not yet arrived – a blurring between the intervie w and testing via various types of increasingly sophisticated media for delivery, not least the Internet. One can also en visage the use of te xtual inserts and animations to the Internet-deli vered interviews. This w ould be, for instance, a w ay of presenting the ‘situations’ in the situational interviews described in Chapter 3. Again this w ould seem to parallel some of the Internet de velopments envisaged by Bartram (1999), including ‘realistic in trays’. As yet, as in other f ields, it does not seem as if the Internet will wholly support face-to-face interviews (see, for example, Sheehy and Gallagher’s (1995) discussion of the limitations of technology in virtual communications netw orks). We are still for the moment at least, and as I said in 1995 more lik ely to find pluralist approaches to interviews, with a continuing mix of the remote and the f ace-to-face, notwithstanding some increase in the former . Re gardless of the medium of deli very the intervie w itself in all its man y forms will clearly continue to function as a focus point for discourse between people.

Appendix I SAMPLE SPI REPORT NAME: ALISON SOMEBODY Overview Alison Somebody is focused on end results and directed in her approach. She has a strong tendenc y to w ork to produce def inite outcomes. She will be straightforward in her dealings with others and will generally carry them along with her . Along the w ay, though, she may not do all necessary to b uild rapport for the longer term. She appears to be interested in change and will seek to use it effectively to help gain objectives. She may be uncomfortable in situations in which she is not able to be in the driving seat herself and is likely, in fact, to seek a substantial degree of independence in her work.

Personal drives and motivations Ms Somebody likes to have distinct goals and objectives, in the sense of ha ving particular things to aim for . When she has achie ved her objectives she will feel a sense of success. It will be important for her to have the opportunity of e xperiencing successes on a short-term as well as a continuing basis. To this end she is lik ely to break activities down into a series of sub-projects, each with their o wn clear goals, and to w ork to wards these. She will also, though, ha ve her sights clearly set on the longer term and will ha ve quite substantial ambitions. It will be important for her management to recognise that she is personally ambitious and w ould wish to know that there is continued scope for growth within the organisation. This may be afforded either by prospects of promotion or by her ha ving the opportunity to feel

150 Appendix I that she will continue to be challenged and gi ven scope for personal development along the way. Goals and tar gets are also important for Ms Somebody because they provide her with the structure for her w ork. She will be diligent herself in directing and controlling her acti vities in an orderly w ay and will probably wish to impose her sense of structure on others. Thus, a little paradoxically , it is not clear that she w ould necessarily fit in with the systems, procedures or e ven structures determined by her organisation. It may be important for her to be helped to recognise the degree of balance that the compan y will be prepared to accept in this regard and where they would insist that their predetermined ways of doing things are to be followed. Perhaps not surprisingly , Ms Somebody is quite positi ve about change. Although not wishing to in volve herself in chaotic situations she will see orderly and systematic change, in which she has a driving and central part to play as being critical for her success and that of the organisation. She will respond fle xibly, we belie ve, and w ould be likely to produce new ways of doing things as she seeks to harness the possibilities af forded by change. She ga ve v ery clear e vidence of a range of situations in which changes which others had percei ved as overly challenging and, indeed, potentially disastrous, af forded her with the opportunity for f inding new growth potential personally and in terms of the part of the business that she was directing.

Interacting with people Ms Somebody has an a wareness that she can sometimes be rather overpowering with others. On the positi ve side of this she has sometimes used her tendenc y to be li vely and combative with her staf f and colleagues in order to spur them on to greater endea vours and successes. Thus she lik es challenge and, to some de gree, e xpects others to respond to challenges as well as challenging her on occasions. She is less comfortable, in f act, in w orking with and through those staff who require support. She sees this herself as an area of some deficit in her approach and has sometimes tak en some steps to alter her behaviour. This having been said, though, it seems lik ely that she will continue to be rather forceful and, by the same token, not typically empathetic at times. Continuing to surround herself with ef fective others who respond positi vely to challenge is lik ely to be a more appropriate tactic than e xpecting her to shift her natural beha viour

Appendix I 151 through 180 de grees. Indeed the a wareness that she already has of tendencies to be o verly forceful, challenging and hard dri ving may be as far as she will go in this direction and at least do a little to mitigate the adverse impact that her naturally forceful beha viour will ha ve on some people. Although independent, success-minded and tending to def ine successes herself, Ms Somebody will also appreciate recognition from others. These others will need to be signif icant and she may, in fact, not react well if what she sees as minor accomplishments are recognised by those who she w ould not percei ve as of particularly high status or very effective themselves. Thus to some degree she sees herself as operating in a masterclass en vironment in which praise for business success is hard won but where, too, due recognition is appropriately given. Although material rewards appear to have some importance for her , these really seem to stand as symbols for recognition and have not, in fact, featured strongly in the motivational picture that we have seen.

Handling information Ms Somebody appears to be systematic and also rapid in her approach to handling information. In gathering information from others she would tend to ask them about signif icant points or heads of issues. Then she will function in one of tw o ways, depending on the circumstances. To begin with she will be likely to form an overview, dismissing from further consideration those aspects of the situation that are not critical b ut seeing links between the main flo ws and direction of issues. For example she was clear about the balance between handling short-term change while still maintaining the compan y’s core b usiness strengths which, in fact, appear to lie in a relatively stable area of business. Ha ving made her general o verview of an issue or set of issues she is then lik ely to delv e do wn into considerable depth to follow through further on specif ic topics. She is, perhaps, more comfortable in handling comple xity when it is e xpressed v erbally than in terms of numbers. However, she does not appear to be without facility in the latter area, although she w ould tend, where possible, to get others to do the donkey work in this regard. Part of her orientation to change appears to be to b uild pictures of possible future scenarios. When she is doing this she will be lik ely to consider a very wide range of options and, in w orking with a team of

152 Appendix I others, will want to go through processes of brainstorming and speculation about ideas. She sees this w ork as particularly important for handling a changing environment. She sees her mental preparation at this time as putting her in a good position to cope with a v ariety of eventualities that come up and, indeed, appears to have done this quite effectively on a number of occasions in the past.

Appendix II Some UK counselling organisations Relationship counselling RELATE Herbert Gray College Little Church Street Rugby CV21 3AP Telephone: 01788 573241

Bereavement Cruse Bereavement Care Cruse House 126 Sheen Road Richmond Surrey TW9 1UR Telephone: 020 8940 4818

Other crises The Samaritans 10 The Grove Slough SL1 1QP Telephone: 0345 909090

154 Appendix II

General British Association for Counselling (BAC) 1 Regents Place Rugby Warwickshire CV21 2PJ Telephone: 01788 578328 Note: BAC publish an e xtensive list of counselling or ganisations worldwide.

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Index References in italic indicate figures add = address A-level examinations 130 ability instruments 96 ‘absence of interviewer’ story 30 Albrecht, T L 110 analysis exercises 61 analytical techniques, market research 119–20 Anderson, N R 19, 138 anthropology interviews 134 appearance, personal 11–12 application forms 12, 24 appraisals 70–76 appraisers 70–72 behaviour ratings 73 pay links 72 process 75 training 73–74 Armstrong, M 70, 76, 103 Arvey, R D 10–11, 20, 138, 140 assessment centres 45, 48, 59–64 exercise types 61–63, 64 interviews 63 process 59–61, 60 attitude surveys 114, 116 auditions 66–67 Awosunle, S 18, 55 bands of error, surveys 116, 117 Bartram, D 147 BDI (Behavioural Description Interview) 47–48

behaviour focus, structured interviews 35–36 behavioural anchorings 73 Behavioural Description Interview (BDI) 47–48 Bellows 137 bereavement counselling 101–02 Cruse, add 153 Bevan, S 138 Block, J 134 board interviews see panel interviews body language 3, 10–11 Boyatzis, R 40 Boyle, S 19 brainwashing 108 briefing interviewees 143 Brindle, L 94 British Association for Counselling 88; add 154 Burnett, J 88 business process re-engineering 38–39 business-to-business satisfaction surveys 111 Campbell, J P 12 Campion, J E 10–11, 20, 138, 140 card-sorting methods 37, 134 career development interviews 83, 143 career management 142–43 CATI (computer assisted telephone interviewing) 111, 112

166 Index celebrity interviews 124–26 challenging questions 22 civil service recruitment 6 Clarke, A D B 16–17 climate surveys 114, 116 closed questions 21 coaching perspective, appraisals 76 communication technology 145–148 competencies 40–44 and appraisal 75 competency-based interviews see criterion-based interviews composite satisfaction surveys 119 comprehensive structured interviews (CSI) 54 computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) 111, 112 confession extraction 108 confusing questions 26–27 conscious indicators, unconscious compared 10–12, 13 ‘conventional’ selection interviews 15–31, 138, 142 horror stories 28, 30 intention and practice 26–28, 29 methods 20–24, 25, 26 popularity 15–20 costs conventional interviews 16 SPI 54 counselling interviews 3, 12, 87–102, 90, 143, 146–7 bereavement 101–02 crisis counselling 98–99 general form 7, 9, 87–91 marriage guidance 99–101 organisations 153–54 projective tests 133 redundancy 91–95, 93 staff development 83 vocational guidance 96–98 court proceedings 108 crisis counselling 98–99 Samaritans, add 153

criterion (competency)-based interviews 35, 44–46, 48, 63, 64 critical incident methods 35, 38–39, 46–48, 134 Cronshaw 59 Cruse Bereavement Care, add 153 CSI (comprehensive structured interviews) 54 cultural differences 10, 134 customer interviews 118–20, 145 CVs 12, 24 debriefing 128–29 defence mechanism test 133 definitions 4 degree course selection study 16–17 development centres 78–84, 79 directive counselling 89–91, 95 disciplinary interviews 76–77 discrimination issues 11, 35, 140 discussions, group 61 dislike of job candidate 17 drama school auditions 66 Edenborough, R A 12, 107 employment decisions, research need 139–41 employment pattern changes 141–43 career management 142–43 effect on interviewing 142 equality issues 11, 140, 144 error range, surveys 116–18, 117 Estep 137 ethics 140–144 evaluation process, assessment centres 59–61 Evarts, M 41 event reporting 128–29 evidence gathering 107–08 examinations 4, 129–30 excellence modelling 49–51 exit interviews 128–29 ‘expert’ interviewees 106–07, 123–24 extended interviews 57–67 assessment centres 59–64, 60, 64

Index 167 degrees of structure 57–58 follow-up interviews 64–66 panel interviews 58–59 work sampling 66–67 external v internal redundancy counselling 91–92 Eysenck, H J 109 face-to-face interviews, surveys 110–11, 119 feedback interviewing development centre 78–84, 79 selection 64–66 feelings, about job candidates 17–18 financial consultants 7, 8, 144 Five-fold Grading System 33, 34–35 Flanagan, J C 39 Fletcher, C 140 focus groups 7, 9, 109–10, 113, 118 SPI development 49–51 follow-up interviewing 64–66 foreign language examinations 130 Forsythe, S 139 Fox, G 76, 147 Freud, Sigmund 6 Fryatt, J 138 future of interviewing 3–4, 137–48 changing practices 144–45 communication technology 145–48 employment pattern changes 141–43 research 137–41 Gallagher 148 Gifford, R 11 grading jobs 105–06 Green, R G 107 grief counselling 101–02 intruding upon private 126–27 gross misconduct interviews 77 group discussion exercises 61 group interviews 9 see also focus groups guidance interviews see counselling interviews Guttman scaling 114, 116

halo effect 24, 25 Hamilton, K 147 Handy, C 141 Harris, M H 53 helping professions 130–32 resource allocation 132 sources of complexity 130–32 Herriot, P 139 horror stories 28, 30 hypothesis-testing 18 impression management 138–39 improvement interviews 76–77 in-basket exercises 61, 63, 64 ‘inappropriate questioning’ story 30 ‘inebriated interviewers’ story 30 ‘informal’ panel interviews 59 information flow comparisons counselling v selection 88–89 job evaluation v selection 103, 104 performance v selection 69–70, 71 information-giving, in selection interviews 24, 26 information-providing interviews 103–21, 104, 123–36 examinations 129–30 expert 106–07 helping professions 130–32 job evaluation 103–06 journalistic 123–28 legal proceedings 107–08 ‘post-event’ 128–29 psychological and social science 132–35 survey interviewing 108–20, 112, 115, 116, 117 Inquisition 5 intercepts 110–11 interest instruments 96 internal v external redundancy counselling 91–92 interpretation of SPI questions 51–52 interrogation 4–5, 22 interruptions 20, 26–27 horror story 28

168 Index ‘interview’ definitions 4 introductory process 20 intrusiveness, journalistic interviewing 126–27 ‘jargon’ horror story 28 JKI (Job Knowledge Index) 96 job analysis 105 job descriptions 39–40 job evaluation 103–06 selection compared 106 Job Knowledge Index (JKI) 96 job specifications 39–40 ‘jobs for life’ 141–42 journalistic interviews 123–28 celebrity and political 126–28 Desert Island Discs 126 experts 123–24 intrusiveness 126–27 promotional interviews 127–28 Kelly, G A 37 ‘killer instinct’ horror story 30 KPMG 135 Kruger, R A 110 Kryzstofiak, F 140 Ladurie, E L R 5 layouts of rooms 28, 29 leading questions 21 legal proceedings 107–08 like/dislike of job candidate 17 Likert scaling 114, 116 listening 27 ‘literary’ interviews 5 ‘lousy interviewers’ 17 Management Charter Initiative (MCI) 44 market research interviewing 118–20 marriage guidance counselling 99–101 RELATE, add 153 McDaniel, M 33 McGovern, T V 11 McGregor, D 76

MCI (Management Charter Initiative) 44 McLaughlin, P 126 medical interviews 131, 144 Mehrabian, A 10 methods, selection interview 20–26 information-giving 24, 26 question types and formats 20–24 setting 20 Miles, D W 55 ‘milk round’ horror story 28, 30 misconduct interviews 77 moderators 110 mourning processes 101 mutual halo effect 24, 25 National Institute of Industrial Psychology (NIIP) 96 negative behaviour, countering 94–95 neutral questioning 21 Newman, J M 140 non-directive counselling 89–91, 95 non-verbal behaviour 10–11 note-taking 27 numbers of interviewees 9 of interviewers 8–9 objectivist-psychometric model 19, 35 O’Driscoll, M P 3 open interview formats 7–8, 9 open questions 21–22 organisation (staff) surveys 7, 113–14, 115 origins of interviewing 3, 4–6 Orwell, George 49 Osgood’s Semantic Differential 120 oyster hypothesis 94 panel interviews 9, 58–59 survey work 110, 118 paraverbal behaviour 10 participant reports 63 patronage 6 Patterned Behavioural Description Interview (PBDI) 47–48

Index 169 pauses 26 pay, and appraisals 72 PBDI (Patterned Behavioural Description Interview) 47–48 performance management interviewing 69–85, 71 appraisals 70–76 improvement and discipline 76–77 staff development 78–84, 79 personality instruments 97 personality models 17–18 Peterson, C 94 physical appearance 11–12 physical setting 20, 26, 28, 29 ‘Pickwick’s interview’ 5 pilot surveys 114 political interviews 124–26, 144–45 political (polling) surveys 7, 114–18, 117 pseudo- 118 popularity of interviewing 15–20 portmanteau questions 26 ‘post-event’ interviews 128–29 posture 10 power in interviews 139 pre-arranged market research interviews 119 pre-determined questions 7–8 prejudice (discrimination) 11, 35, 140 probing questions 22 procedure comparisons 7–10, 8, 9 numbers taking part 8–10 professional interviews 130–32, 137 projective techniques 126, 132–33 promotional interviews 127–28 pseudo-surveys, political 118 psychological interviews 132–35 psychometric tests 12, 133 feedback interviews 64–65, 66 vocational guidance 96 Q-sort technique 134–35 questioning 20–24, 26–28 competency-based 46 counselling 89

organisation surveys 114 pre-determined 7–8 SPI 51–52 redundancy counselling 88, 89, 91–95, 93 reflecting questions 22–24 regulatory framework 144 RELATE, add 153 repertory grid technique 36–38, 113, 134 research into interviewing 137–41 market 118–20 research-type interviews 133–34 resource allocation interviews 132 response scales, surveys 114, 116 restated questions 26, 27 Rogers, C R 6–7, 89 role plays 62–63, 64 room layouts 28, 29 Rorschach ink-blot test 132–33 Samaritans, add 153 samples v signs 12 sampling 108, 111, 114 scales, survey 114, 116 second interviews see extended interviews selection firms, specialist 6 selection interviews 3, 7–8, 15–67, 137 job evaluation compared 106 origins 5–6, 7 see also ‘conventional’ selection interviews; extended interviews; structured interviews self-discovery focus, counselling 89, 90 Seligman, M E P 94 ‘selling the organisation’ 19 setting, physical 20, 26, 28, 29 Seven Point Plan 34 Sheehy, N 148

170 Index sign-off process, appraisals 70–72 signs v samples 12 situational interviews 47–48 situational power 139 Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) 65, 66, 97 Smart, D 3 Smart, G H 135 sociability factors 17 social differences 10 social niceties 20 social science interviews 132–35 special knowledge interviews see information-providing interviews speech as behaviour indicator 49 SPI see structured psychometric interviews staff development interviews 78–84, 79 staff (organisation) surveys 7, 113–14, 115 standardisation 36, 45–46, 52 Stephenson, W 134 straw polls 110 stress counselling 98–99 ‘strong assumption’ 15–17 Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory 96 structured interviews 6, 19, 33–56 criterion-based 44–48 models 36–44 psychometric (SPI) 48–55 research 141 scope 33–36 structured psychometric interviews (SPI) 36, 48–55 excellence modelling 49–51 origins 48–49 questions and interpretation 51–52 research 141 reservations 53–54 sample report 149–52 use and delivery 52–53 subject matter experts (SMEs) 39 subjectivist social perception perspective 19, 35–36, 146

succession planning 142–43 survey interviews 7, 108–20, 112 applications 113–20, 115, 116, 117 methods 109–13 Taguchi techniques 107 Taylor, P J 3 tele-conferencing 146 telephone interviewing 53–54, 111–13, 145–46 tele-working 146 tests psychological 132–33 see also psychometric tests Three Musketeers 4 Tinsley, H E 11 Total Quality Management (TQM) 107 training 36 appraisal 73–74, 76 assessment centre 45, 59–60 SPI 51, 53, 54 trauma counselling 98–99 Trumbo, D 137, 142 two-to-one interviews 9 Ulrich, L 137, 142 unconscious indicators 10–12, 13, 17 underperformance interviews 76–77 university examinations 4, 129–30 veterinary surgeons 131–32 viva voce examinations 4, 129–30 vocational guidance 96–98 Wagner, R 137 Walmsley, H 10, 88 War Office Selection Boards (WOSBs) 6, 45 Wernimont, P F 12 whanau support 10 Wiesner, W H 59 work sampling interviews 66–67 Wrenn, C L 2 Wright, P M 64 Zamyatin, Y xv